Add Donald Trump to the list of prominent right-wingers getting diarrhea of the mouth over Friday night’s horrific massacre in Paris. Apparently the Donald would have us believe that Friday’s horror wouldn’t have happened had citizens been armed.
At a rally on Saturday night in Beaumont, Texas, Trump mused that France had “the toughest gun laws in the world.” However, as Trump saw it, those laws didn’t do any good on Friday night because “nobody had guns except the bad guys, nobody.” Trump believed that things would have been “much, much different” had ordinary citizens been armed.
This is getting old, folks. Very old. Lately, whenever a massacre of this magnitude takes place, the standard response from the right seems to be some variation of Wayne LaPierre’s post-Sandy Hook spiel–“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Apparently Trump wasn’t paying attention when Newt Gingrich got kicked up, down, and sideways by a France 24 host for making a similarly idiotic statement.
But since this is a major-party presidential candidate saying this, I’ll play. French officials believe that the attackers used several AK-47s found in an abandoned car in Montreuil, a Paris suburb. Several witnesses at the Bataclan theater reported that the attackers hurled grenades at them. Moreover, the suicide bombers were wearing vests that contained triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, a highly unstable explosive. I don’t think I need to tell you if someone had someone seen one of these thugs acting suspiciously and fired on them.
What part of “AK-47” does Trump not understand? Or “hand grenade”? Or “unstable explosive”? Plus, can you imagine what would happen if several people drew and fired all at once at the Bataclan? Given what we know about the madness that ensued down there, it would have only resulted in a bigger bloodbath.
Even a cursory amount of research would reveal that this massacre happened in part because ISIS was able to take advantage of a massive black market. Officials believe the attackers got their arsenal from eastern Europe; a Montenegrin man currently being held in Germany is suspected of supplying the attackers. The way to prevent another massacre like this is to sever that pipeline.
It’s not the first time that Trump has fallen into the “(noun) (verb) more guns” trap. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Trump mused on Twitter:
Isn’t it interesting that the tragedy in Paris took place in one of the toughest gun control countries in the world?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 7, 2015
This largely disappeared into the ether until this latest massacre. Its discovery prompted the French ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, to fire back (h/t to Addicting Info):
That’s the only appropriate response to this latest spiel from Trump as well. Add this to the already voluminous dossier of evidence that proves Trump is manifestly unfit and unqualified to be president of the United States.
