Donald Trump Says There Would Have Been Less Blood Spilled If Paris Victims Had Carried Guns

Less than 24 hours after an old tweet of his regarding the Charlie Hebdo attack was mistaken for a comment about Friday night’s horrific terror attack in Paris, Donald Trump made sure to double-down on the gist of his original message during a campaign rally. Speaking in front of a crowd of supporters in Texas on Saturday, the GOP Presidential frontrunner and smushed rotten grapefruit essentially blamed France and the victims for their deaths when he pointed to the country’s tough gun control laws as the main reason the coordinated attacks were so deadly.

“When you look at Paris, toughest gun laws in the world, nobody had guns but the bad guys,” The Donald said after having the crowd hold a moment of silence for the victims. “Nobody had guns. And they were just shooting them one by one, and then they broke in and had a big shootout and ultimately killed the terrorists.”

“And I will tell you what—you can say what you want, if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry, it would have been a much, much different situation.”

The celebrity billionaire isn’t the first one to toss out NRA talking points in relation to the tragedy that caused the deaths of 129 people and left more than 300 wounded. In a tweet on Friday shortly after news broke, former Speaker of the House and 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich stated that the terrorists could have been stopped if 10 to 15 people in the theater had concealed gun permits.

Just so we are clear, the seven attackers were armed with Russian machine guns, grenades and explosive suicide belts. Seven of them detonated their explosive devices to bring about more destruction, some after being engaged in gunfire with police — police who were also equipped with automatic weapons. However, go ahead and keep telling yourself that the whole thing would have been different if some yahoo with a 9 MM and a CCW would have been able to stop the whole thing like he was Charles Bronson out of Death Wish. Keep telling yourself that.

Meanwhile, French journalists have already criticized American conservatives for trying to take political advantage of the attacks.