Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump says he was talking about additional guards or employees when it came to having guns in the Orlando club where the deadly terrorist attack took place last week.
“When I said that if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter Monday.
After the Orlando terrorist attack at a gay nightclub last Sunday in which 49 people were killed and 53 wounded, Mr. Trump had suggested that more guns could have mitigated the carnage.
“If you had guns in that room, even if you had a number of people having ’em strapped to their ankle or strapped to their waist where bullets could have flown in the other direction right at him, you wouldn’t have had the same kind of a tragedy,” Mr. Trump said on CNN last Monday.
“It’s too bad that some of the young people that were killed over the weekend didn’t have guns attached to their [hip], frankly, where bullets could have flown in the opposite direction,” Mr. Trump also told radio host Howie Carr last week.
“It sounded like there were no guns. They had a security guard; other than that, there were no guns in the room,” he said. “Had people been able to fire back, it would have been a much different outcome.”
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But officials with the National Rifle Association on Sunday said alcohol and firearms don’t mix.
“No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms,” Chris Cox, who heads up the NRA’s lobbying arm, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “That defies common sense. It also defies the law. It’s not what we’re talking about here.”
“What Donald Trump has said is what the American people know is common sense, that if somebody had been there to stop this faster, fewer people would have died,” he said.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said: “I don’t think you should have firearms where people are drinking.”
The NRA later clarified in a tweet: “if you’re going to carry, don’t drink. OK to carry in restaurants that serve alcohol.”
Mr. Trump had already turned some heads last week when he said he planned to meet with the NRA, which has endorsed him, to talk about barring people on the terror watch list or no-fly list from buying firearms.
Mr. Cox said Mr. Trump and the NRA are on the same page on that issue.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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