WATCH: Trump Defends Gun Rights After Massacre, Says Shooter “Should Get Death Penalty”
Before stepping aboard Air Force One to head to Indianapolis, President Trump addressed the “devastating” shooting that occurred at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood Saturday morning. When asked by reporters about tighter gun laws, he quickly discounted, saying they had “little to do with it.”
“This has little to do with it if you take a look,” Trump said on gun laws. He continued, explaining armed guards could have prevented the tragedy. “If they had protection inside the results would have been far better,” the president said. “Maybe it could have been a very much different situation.” He added,“They didn’t have protection. They had a maniac walk in and they didn’t have any protection.”
Pres. Trump says gun laws have "little to do" with outcome of shooting at Pittsburgh synagogue: "If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better. This is a dispute that will always exist I suspect." https://t.co/rIc3B3kOwz pic.twitter.com/NFANjPndPg
— ABC News (@ABC) October 27, 2018
Multiple fatalities were reported, and three police officers were shot by the suspect who has since been identified as 48-year-old Robert Bowers.
“People who do this should get the death penalty,” Trump said. “I think they should stiffen up laws and I think they should very much bring the death penalty to anybody who does a thing like this to innocent people.”
He added: “They should really suffer the ultimate price—pay the ultimate price. I’ve felt this way for a very long time. People disagree with me, and I can’t imagine why.”
The president also called for the death penalty earlier this month to apply to all “criminals” who kill police officers.
Although the death penalty is legal in Pennsylvania, current Gov. Tom Wolf halted the process when he took office in 2015. The last person to be executed under the death penalty in Pennsylvania was in 1999, the first since 1962.
He added, “if there was an armed guard inside the temple they would have been able to stop him.”
“Maybe there would have been nobody killed except for him, frankly,” Trump continued. “Isn’t it a shame that you have to think of that inside a temple or inside a church? But certainly, the result would have been far better.”
The president added that “the world is a violent world.”
“You think when you’re over it, it just goes away,” Trump said. “But then it comes back in the form of a madman—a whacko.”
Trump added that prior to taking office he “watched instances like this,” calling it a “shame.”
“But it’s even tougher when you’re the president of the United States,” Trump said. “You have to watch this kind of a thing happen, and it’s so sad to see.”
WATCH:
Throughout President Trump’s 2016 campaign, he stressed that armed citizens could have stopped shootings like in the case of San Bernadino, Chattanooga, and in Orlando, Florida at Pulse Night Club.
On the Monday after the massacre at the nightclub -where guns were not permitted – the then-candidate said during an interview with CNN, “If you had some guns in that club the night that this took place, if you had guns on the other side, you wouldn’t have had the tragedy that you had.”
“If you had guns in that room, if you had — even if you had a number of people having them strapped to their ankle or strapped to their waist where bullets could have flown in the other direction right at him, you wouldn’t have had that tragedy,” Trump said.
After the February shooting in Parkland, Florida, Trump made similar comments about how massacres such as those at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School could be prevented, by arming school teachers, and doing away with gun-free zones.
“It only works when you have people very adept at using firearms, of which you have many,” Trump said during an emotionally searing session on Wednesday that, extraordinarily, was broadcast live on national television. “It would be teachers and coaches.”
Referring to Aaron Feis, a football coach who used his body as a shield to protect a student during the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, the president continued: “If the coach had a firearm in his locker when he ran at this guy – that coach was very brave, saved a lot of lives, I suspect.
“But if he had a firearm, he wouldn’t have had to run, he would have shot him, and that would have been the end of it. This would only obviously be for people who are very adept at handling a gun. It’s called concealed carry, where a teacher would have a concealed gun on them. They’d go for special training and they would be there and you would no longer have a gun-free zone. Gun-free zone to a maniac, because they’re all cowards, a gun-free zone is: ‘Let’s go in and let’s attack, because bullets aren’t coming back at us’.”
Trump added: “An attack has lasted, on average, about three minutes. It takes five to eight minutes for responders, for the police to come in, so the attack is over. If you had a teacher who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly.”
Then in November 2017, after the worst mass shooting in the modern history of Texas, Trump again brought up the fact that this was not “a guns situation.”
When Trump was asked by reporters in Tokyo what policies he would consider supporting in response to the shooting, Trump said, “We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries. But this isn’t a guns situation,” he said. “Fortunately somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction.”
The difference with the shooting at the church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and the other mass shootings is that in this case, an armed man was able to defend himself, the congregation, and successfully minimize the number of fatalities that day.
More lives may have been saved in the synagogue today, had more citizens been armed and able to defend themselves.
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