Contradicting statements by presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, the NRA’s top lobbyist said in an interview Sunday on “This Week” that patrons of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando should not have been armed.
“No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms,” said Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action. “That defies common sense. It also defies the law.”
At a rally on Friday, Trump said the massacre would have been prevented if some of the nightclub victims had been armed.
“If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here, right to their waste or right to their ankle, and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes boom, boom, you know that would have been a beautiful sight folks,” Trump said.
In contrast, Cox’s words more closely aligned with a statement from President Obama during his visit to Orlando on Thursday.
"The notion that the answer to this tragedy would be to make sure that more people in a nightclub are similarly armed to the killer defies common sense," Obama said.
Cox, however, also maintained that bans on assault-style firearms in Paris, Brussels and San Bernardino failed to prevent terror attacks. He said any future such bans in the U.S. would also be ineffective.
“Criminals and terrorists aren’t going to be deterred by one more gun control law,” Cox told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Trump this week also took a position slightly different from many other Republicans, saying he will talk to the NRA about not allowing people on federal terror watch lists to buy guns.
In a statement Wednesday, the NRA said its policy remains that the FBI should investigate anyone on a terror watch list who tries to buy a gun.
“Due process protections should be put in place that allow law-abiding Americans who are wrongly put on a watch list to be removed,” the NRA statement says.
However, the NRA’s Cox said on “This Week,” “There is not a difference between what Mr. Trump is saying and what the NRA’s position is.”
The Senate is set to take up four gun control measures Monday, after Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) staged a near 15-hour filibuster on the Senate floor this week. The Connecticut senator on Sunday continued to demand gun restrictions.
“We should be making our gun laws less full of Swiss cheese holes so that future killings don’t happen,” Murphy said.
The Senate is preparing to vote on gun control proposals tomorrow, but there is little hope they will pass.
“I admit that the background checks bill is going to be tough to get 60 votes on,” Murphy said. “But we still have hope we can get Republicans to support the bill stopping terrorists from getting weapons.”
Murphy said that if proposals currently on the table had already been in place they “may have stopped the [Orlando] shooting.”
“I’m still hopeful we’re going to be able get votes,” he said.
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