Last week, Donald Trump achieved what many thought impossible: He made a proposal for giving more people guns that even the National Rifle Association found too extreme.
If you don't recall, Trump said that Omar Mateen's massacre of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando would have ended much differently if some of the club's patrons were packing heat. NRA exec Chris Cox said on Sunday that Trump's proposal "defies common sense" because "no one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms."
Trump on Monday hilariously tried to back off his own proposal by saying that he was "obviously" only suggesting that presumably sober club employees and security guards carry weapons:
Except, if we go back and look at his original remarks, it wasn't "obvious" at all that Trump was talking only about club employees. Here's the full quote from a speech he gave on June 17 in The Woodlands, Tx.:
If we had people, where the bullets were going in the opposite direction, right smack between the eyes of this maniac -- if some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here, right to their waist or to their ankle, and this son of a bitch comes out and starts shooting, and one of the people in the room happened to have it, and goes boom -- boom -- you know what? That would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks. That would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight. So don't let them take your guns away.
Why would Trump need to tell people to not "let them take your guns away" if he were only talking about club employees who were authorized to carry firearms? Although it's impossible to do a clear reading of any Trump statement since he inevitably rambles so much, the strong implication here is that he wanted to see club patrons packing heat to take down Mateen.
