Trump blames French gun laws for Paris attacks
US President Donald Trump said Friday that one armed person could have averted the 2015 Paris attacks. The audience at the US's National Rifle Association (NRA) applauded and cheered when he told them that if France had less tight gun laws "it would have been a whole different story".
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After claiming that a London hospital is like a warzone because of knife crime, Trump turned his attention to the Paris attacks, during which 130 people died and many more were injured in shootings and bombings at a theatre, cafés and outside the Stade de France football stadium.
"Nobody has guns in Paris, nobody, and we all remember the more than 130 people, plus the tremendous numbers of people that were horribly, horribly wounded," he told the NRA convention in Dallas, Texas.
"They died in a restaurant and various other close-proximity places. They were brutally killed by a small group of terrorists, that had guns.
"They took their time and gunned them down one by one."
The US president then simulated lining victims up and shooting them, while saying: "Boom! Come over here. Boom! Come over here. Boom! Come over here. Boom!"
"If one employee, or one patron had a gun, or if one person in this room had been there with a gun, aimed at the opposite direction, the terrorists would have fled or been shot," Trump concluded.
Firearms were used to kill 13,286 people in the US in 2015, excluding suicide, and 4,854 have been killed this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
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