Last week, Donald Trump argued that victims at the Orlando gay nightclub Pulse should have been armed when a gunman killed 49 people and injured 53 others in the early hours of June 12. Now he says he "obviously" wasn't saying that.
In an interview with radio host Howie Carr the day after the shooting, Trump argued that if more people at Pulse had been carrying guns, they could have fired back at the shooter.
“It’s too bad that some of the young people that were killed over the weekend didn’t have guns, you know, attached to their hips, frankly, and you know where bullets could have flown in the opposite direction," Trump said. "It would have been a much different deal. I mean, it sounded like there were no guns. They had a security guard. Other than that there were no guns in the room. Had people been able to fire back, it would have been a much different outcome.”
On Monday, the presumptive Republican nominee tweeted that he meant there should have been more armed guards at Pulse:
The majority of people who died in the Orlando shooting were not employees of Pulse, although it's been reported that at least two victims, Kimberly Morris and Deonka Drayton, did work at the club.
Trump received a great deal of criticism for his response to the Orlando shooting, including a speech that The Washington Post described as “laden with falsehoods and exaggeration.” Trump blamed Muslims for not warning authorities about the shooter, thanked supporters who'd congratulated him for predicting violence and suggested that President Barack Obama sympathized with the gunman.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
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