Donald Trump on Monday morning attempted to soften comments he made over the weekend suggesting that someone carrying a gun in the Orlando, Florida, night club could have shortened the deadly shooting.
“If in that club, you had some people, not a lot of people … but if you had somebody with a gun strapped on to their hip, somebody with a gun strapped on to their ankle and you had bullets going in the opposite direction, right at this animal who did this, you would have had a very, very different result,” Trump said at a Saturday rally in Arizona, according to ABC News.
He also told a crowd in Houston that it would have been a “beautiful sight” if “we had people where the bullets were going in the opposite direction, right smack between the eyes of this maniac,” according to NBC News.
When asked about Trump’s comments, officials from the National Rifle Association on Sunday conceded that people should not be armed if they are drinking.
And on Monday morning, Trump insisted that he never said that the Orlando club-goers should have been armed.
When I said that if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 20, 2016
