A twisted response to mass slaughter
I’VE locked horns many times with Trump about America’s appalling culture of gun violence, but not since he’s been President. Now I had my chance. What followed was as depressing as it was shocking and predictable.
‘People will be saying, you’re very tough on security, you want to keep Americans safe – but you don’t do anything about gun violence at all,’ I challenged him. ‘That seems an irrational position for somebody who wants to keep American’s safe.’
‘Right, right,’ he replied. ‘I’m a very big Second Amendment person [the part of the constitution giving the right to bear arms], as you know very well.
‘But take a look at Paris, where you have very, very tough gun controls. Take a look at that horrible slaughter that took place
at the cafes, where so many people were killed. And you had these thugs come in with guns and, one by one, for a long time, they just killed – and hundreds of people wounded, to this day, still in the hospitals. That was one of the worst.
‘And you’ve had many of them [similar incidents] where there are no guns except for the bad guys. So the bad guys have the guns and if you would have had somebody with a gun when they walked in so that you could have had bullets going in the other direction, you wouldn’t have had hundreds of people killed.’
This is same absurd ‘the only answer to gun violence is more guns’ argument trotted out by the National Rifle Association,
the powerful gun lobby group who have been huge Trump cheerleaders and donors.
I pointed out that Britain has 32 gun deaths a year while America has 85 every DAY.
‘But you have a lot of terrorism,’ he snapped back.
But what about the Las Vegas shooter, who bought 55 guns legally in the year prior to his rampage and rained bullets down on 20,000 innocents? Why has nothing been done to stop somebody doing that again?
‘Well, we do have gun control laws and this sick person – he was a sicko. I mean that’s the big problem – they’re sick people. If he didn’t have a gun, he would have had a bomb, or would have something else.’ ‘But he had 55 guns,’ I said. ‘The point is, he would have had 55 bombs,’ replied the President. ‘He would have had 55 of something else.’
‘Why can’t you make it more difficult for him?’
‘You know, we can go around this argument. I’m a Second Amendment person. I think you need it for security.
‘But again, you’ve had so many attacks, where there was only a gun – a bad person’s gun – going in this direction and if you had one on the other side. ‘In fact, that’s a very big example. And if they had the bullets going in the opposite direction, you would have saved a lot of lives.’
Confused? Allow me to translate: President Trump’s answer to what happened in Vegas is for everyone in that 20,000 crowd to be armed with a gun too so they could shoot at the man shooting at them.
And tragically, the majority of Americans agree with him.