France Slams Trump for Saying Gun Owners Could’ve Stopped Paris Attacks

Local Editor

France's foreign ministry and some former top officials condemned US President Donald Trump for claiming that the Bataclan carnage and other 2015 terrorist attacks could have been avoided if the country had looser gun ownership laws.

In this regard, a statement by the French Foreign Ministry noted that: "France expresses its firm disapproval of the comments by President Trump... and asks for the memory of the victims to be respected," in relation to the series of coordinated attacks in which 130 victims were killed in suicide bombings and by gunfire by a group of Islamist terrorists.

"France is proud to be a country where acquiring and carrying firearms is strictly regulated," the ministry emphasized.

Calling Trump's comments "shameful" and "obscene" on his Twitter, former French President Francois Hollande noted that his statements exposed "what he thinks of France and its values."

For his part, Manuel Valls, prime minister at the time of the attacks, called Trump "indecent and incompetent," adding "What more can I say?"

Trump's controversial remarks came during Friday's boisterous speech to the National Rifle Association, in which he used the attack as an illustrative tale.

Trump acted out a scene, mimicking the terrorists lining up their victims, before shooting them. "Boom! Come over here. Boom! Come over here. Boom! Come over here. Boom!" he repeated, ‘recreating' the brutal attack.

"If one employee, or one patron had a gun, or if one person in this room had been there with a gun, aimed at the opposite direction, the terrorists would have fled or been shot," Trump said.

During the NRA speech, Trump also took a swipe at the UK's tight gun control, against the backdrop of its soaring knife crime, and painted a nightmarish scene of an unidentified hospital in the country's capital. "They don't have guns, they have knives, and instead there's blood all over the floors of this hospital," he told the conference in Dallas.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team