Armed citizens are able to defend themselves "only in the movies," French Ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud said this week, striking back at GOP front-runner Donald Trump's contention that it is important for people to arm themselves.
Further, he told Fox News' "Special Report" that he sent a tweet to Trump calling him a "vulture" after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, when a
tweet reappeared on the candidate's Twitter page that was posted in January after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, reports
Breitbart.
“It was a theater, a theater hall," Araud told Special Report. "Imagine a theater hall and suddenly people enter with machine guns and are really killing people … It is only in the movies someone is using his gun to defend himself.”
Trump's initial repeated tweet, "Isn't it interesting that the tragedy in Paris took place in one of the toughest gun control countries in the world?” was quickly taken down and replaced with another that said "My prayers are with the victims and hostages in the horrible Paris attacks. May God be with you all."
Araud also quickly took down his own tweet, that not only called Trump a "vulture," but said the initial tweet was "repugnant."
But even though Trump's tweet was taken down, he still has been saying that Paris, where guns are prohibited, would have been safer if its citizens were armed.
Just one day after the attacks, he told a
rally in Beaumont, Texas, that the ISIS attack in Paris might not have happened if French laws allowed for more people to carry guns.
"The toughest gun laws in the world: Paris," Trump said during a campaign rally crowd of about 8,000. "If they were allowed to carry -- it would have been a much, much different situation."
On Nov. 15, two days after the attacks, Trump was quoted on NBC's
"Meet the Press" as commenting that "you can say what you want, but if [the French people] had guns, if our people had guns, it would have been a much, much different situation.”
And a week later, Trump doubled down on ABC's
"This Week," commenting that "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.”
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Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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