Trump, speaking before the NRA, pissed off the French by saying the terrorist attacks in Paris could have been stopped if only people had been armed
BarkGrowlBite
May 7, 2018
Donald Trump has a habit of putting his mouth in motion before putting his brain in gear. He did it again Friday in Dallas while addressing the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting.
The President assured the NRA that he would protect their Second Amendment rights. Good! But then he called attention to the Paris terrorist attacks and the strict gun controls in France which he said was the reason so many Parisians were killed.
In November 2015, Islamic terrorists carried out a series of mass shootings and suicide bombings in Paris and its northern suburb. A number of restaurants were attacked as well as the Bataan theater where a concert was being held. 89 concert-goers were killed before the French police ended the terrorism at the theater.
Altogether, the attacks on the restaurants and the theater left 130 Parisians dead and another 413 wounded. Here is what Trump had to say about that:
“If one employee or just one patron had a gun, or if one person in this room had been there with a gun, aimed at the opposite direction, the terrorists would have fled or been shot. And it would have been a whole different story.
Nobody has guns in Paris, nobody, and we all remember the more than 130 people, plus the tremendous numbers of people that were horribly, horribly wounded.
They died in a restaurant and various other close-proximity places. They were brutally killed by a small group of terrorists, that had guns.
They took their time and gunned them down one by one.”
How ridiculous! First of all, the terrorists would not have fled. They came prepared to fight the police until dead or to blow themselves up.
And it’s very unlikely that an armed employee or patron could have stopped the theater attacks. They would have had to have been almost face to face with the gunmen.to shoot them down. At any further distance they would have been more likely to strike other theater patrons. Even a face to face confrontation might not have stopped the terrorists.
Years ago, when NYPD cops were only armed with revolvers, a cop and a crook shot it out face to face on a NY sidewalk. When each had emptied their revolvers, neither one had been scathed. And this was a firearm-trained cop.
With hundreds of panic-stricken concert goers scattering in all directions, an armed citizen would have had a hard time aiming at the terrorists. And even if he did, how accurate would he have been with his heart pumping at full speed? He would have probably only added to the death toll of the other patrons.
As for the restaurants, an armed citizen would have had a better chance there, but it is still problematic as to how successful he would have been in stopping the heavily armed terrorists.
Instead of keeping his uncontrollable mouth shut about the Paris shootings, all Trump did was to piss off his new buddy, French President Emmanuel Macron. Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called Trump’s remarks “shameful.”
I’m surprised Trump didn’t bring up the jewel professed by some of the staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment that the Japanese did not invade our West Coast during WW2 because they knew American civilians were armed.
Too bad there is no vaccine or cure for Trump’s foot-in-mouth disease.
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