President Donald Trump on Wednesday doubled down on his repeated and wildly inaccurate claim that the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre could have been prevented if attendees had access to firearms.
Trump appeared to be more in agreement with Democrats than Republicans during much of the televised White House meeting on gun violence. The president’s suggestions included preventing people with mental illnesses from obtaining guns, raising the age limit for buying assault rifles from 18 to 21, and arming teachers in schools.
To back up his ideas, he once again cited the Pulse attack ― which targeted members of the LGBTQ community and left 49 people dead.
“As an example, you take Pulse nightclub,” he said, as seen in the Wall Street Journal video above. “If you had one person in that room that could carry a gun and knew how to use it, it wouldn’t have happened, or certainly not to the extent it did, where he was just in there shooting and shooting and shooting, and they were just defenseless.”
The president, unfortunately, ignored the fact that there was an armed, off-duty police officer at the club on the night of the attack. Adam Gruler was at his second job working Pulse security, and he reportedly exchanged gunfire with shooter Omar Mateen outside the club’s entrance in the wee hours of June 12, 2016.
Gruler attended Trump’s State of the Union speech this year as a special guest of U.S. Rep. Val Demings (D-Orlando).
The president has falsely claimed that no one at Pulse was armed before.
“If you had some guns in that club the night that this took place, if you had guns on the other side, you wouldn’t have had the tragedy that you had,” he told CNN in a June 2016 interview, the day after the attack. “If people in that room had guns with the bullets flying in the opposite direction right at him... right at his head, you wouldn’t have had the same tragedy that you ended up having.”
Just days after that, he offered similar sentiments at a campaign rally in Atlanta.
“If some of those great people that were in that club that night had guns strapped to their waist or strapped to their ankle, and if the bullets were going in the other direction, aimed at this guy who was just open target practice,” he said, “you would’ve had a situation, folks.”
He later clarified on Twitter that he was “obviously talking about additional guards or employees.”
Before You Go
