Trump again says armed concertgoers could have prevented Paris attack
President Trump on Friday reiterated his claim that the 2015 terrorist attacks at the Bataclan nightclub in Paris might have been avoided if some concertgoers had been armed.
“Paris, France, they say has the strongest gun laws in the world,” Trump said Friday during his speech to gun rights advocates at the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) annual convention in Indianapolis.
“If there was one gun being carried by one person on the other side, it very well could have been a whole different result. The shooting went on so long and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it,” he said.
Trump used his fingers to emulate a gun being fired, saying, “Get over here, boom. Here, boom. And then they left. They were captured later.”
The president added that if a “tiny percent” of concertgoers had been able to carry weapons, the attack “probably wouldn’t have happened because the cowards would have known there were people and they’re having guns.”
Trump has weighed in before on the shooting, which left 90 people dead. Coordinated attacks from Islamist extremists at a concert hall, stadium, restaurants and bars killed 130 people and injured hundreds more on Nov. 13, 2015.
The president made very similar comments last year while speaking at the NRA conference in Dallas and was later condemned by the French government.
[The Hill]
Reality
Actually Trump is echoing the NRA’s own argument that if guns are not allowed near schools, churches, and government buildings then shootings cannot be stopped by a “good guy with a gun.” However the empirical evidence is not on Trump’s side.
In 2014 the FBI released a reported titled “A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013” which looked over 13 years of data and a of total of 160 incidents, and concluded the concept of a good guy with a gun was unequivocally proven to be a myth. The number of times a shooting ended after armed citizens exchanged gunfire with the shooters only amounted to 5 times (3.1%). In contrast the number of times unarmed citizens safely and successfully disrupted the shootings was 21 times (13.1%).