Donald Trump tells attendees at the CNN GOP Town Hall in Milwaukee, “we have to cherish our Second Amendment.”
He was responding to a question from Lieutenant Brian Murphy; the first-responder who was shot 15 times while trying to stop the gunman during the August 2012 Sikh Temple attack. Murphy expressed concern that terrorist attacks result in a “backlash against specific minority religious groups.” He asked “how do we protect the constitutional rights of minority groups like the Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and Jews, while still addressing radical Islamization?”
Trump responded by focusing on the threat of terrorism and the problems posed by radical Islam, and by suggesting that Americans have a benefit that must not be relinquished: that benefit is the right to keep and bear arms.
Trump talked about calling for “a temporary ban” on Muslim immigration following the December 2 San Bernardino attack. He then segued to the November 13 Paris attack and said: “We talk about Paris with the gun free zones, we talk about Paris with their strong gun laws. By the way, nobody had guns but the bad guys.”
He then referenced the Second Amendment and brought San Bernardino back into the conversation, saying, “If we would have had guns on the other side…If bullets were going in the opposite direction, you wouldn’t have had the problems that you had in those two places, that I have to tell you. So I think we have to be extremely careful with our Second Amendment and we have to cherish our Second Amendment.”
Trump made a similar observation during a November 22 appearance on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, when he said:
You know George, I am a really big proponent of the Second Amendment. I’ll give you an example–if in Paris some of those people had guns, you wouldn’t have had the horror show that you had where [none of the innocents] had guns.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.