Boom! Come over here.
Oh lord.
US President Donald Trump has outraged French opinion by suggesting the 2015 attacks on Paris could have been stopped by giving people guns.
He mimicked gunmen summoning and shooting victims one by one, saying “Boom! Come over here!” and using his hand to imitate a gun being fired.
Oh christing fuck.
It’s not even the first time – he said it then.
In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, Donald Trump and other American conservatives repeated a familiar and predictable response to mass shootings in other countries: France has a gun problem. If Parisians could legally carry weapons, they could have fought back against the assailants.
That argument doesn’t have much support in France — a country that has around 1,800 firearms deaths every year, as opposed to the more than 33,000 in the United States.
The US has more people, of course – 326 million compared to France’s 67 million. Call it five times as many, then multiply 1,800 by 5: 9000. 33,000 is quite a lot more than 9000.
Back to the BBC:
The French foreign ministry called for the victims’ memory to be respected.
“France expresses its firm disapproval of the comments by President Trump about the attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris and asks for the memory of the victims to be respected,” the foreign ministry said.
François Hollande, who was French president at the time of the attacks, said Mr Trump’s remarks were “shameful”. They “said a lot about what he thinks of France and its values”, he added.
Manuel Valls, who was France’s prime minister in 2015, tweeted: “Indecent and incompetent. What more can I say?”
…
“Paris, France, has the toughest gun laws in the world…” he told the NRA.
“Nobody has guns in Paris, nobody, and we all remember more than 130 people, plus tremendous numbers of people that were horribly, horribly wounded. Did you notice that nobody ever talks about them?
“They were brutally killed by a small group of terrorists that had guns. They took their time and gunned them down one by one. Boom! Come over here. Boom! Come over here. Boom!
“But if one employee or just one patron had a gun, or if just one person in this room had been there with a gun, aimed at the opposite direction, the terrorists would have fled or been shot.”
They wouldn’t have fled, they were on a suicide mission. One employee or patron wouldn’t have been able to shoot many of them, if any.
But more to the point it’s just so disgusting – pantomiming it, saying “Boom.”
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, tweeted that President Trump’s depiction of the 2015 attacks was “scornful and unworthy”.
La mise en scène des attentats de 2015 par le Président #Trump est méprisante et indigne. Fluctuat nec mergitur.
— Anne Hidalgo (@Anne_Hidalgo) May 5, 2018
The Latin is Paris’s motto: It is tossed by the waves but doesn’t sink.
Trump’s motto is: “I can’t keep my mouth shut.”
https://youtu.be/YecDQQbiC_s
Yeah, pantomiming it with that smarmy expression is beneath contempt. And introducing that section of the speech with the “let’s talk about guns” applause line (this is an NRA crowd) is vile.
And, look, there is legitimate discussion to be had about a crowd being left so helpless. But not like this.
He had a go at London, too. He had another little pantomime – this time stabbing – to illustrate his lie.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/04/trump-nra-london-hospital-knives
Who needs sane policy, when you have childish Bruce Willis fantasies instead?
Watches Trump rant about London and “knives, knives, knives.”
He’s totally got a point. Knives are at least as lethal as machine guns, except for the part about how you can’t fire them from a distance or hit multiple targets in seconds or carry enough of them to kill 30, 50, 100 in minutes.
@latsot #2 – thanks for the link. From the article:
The Daily Fucking Mail. Of course it was. I should have bloody guessed.
@Karellen,
That’s the story, I think, but the version I read was from another source and was (surprise) far less sensational. According to it, the doctor was comparing the wounds to those that might be seen in a war zone, not implying that the numbers of casualties were similar.
He also commented that gun wounds are (another surprise) typically much worse than knife wounds and a lot more difficult to repair.
Anyway, according to Trump, Americans having more guns will make Londoners safer. Rather too high a price to pay, if you ask me.
Perhaps someone whose Latin education is more recent than mine (which is probably almost anyone with an education in the language) can render this into that regal tongue.
(The best I could come up with, after torturing my poor old memory, was ‘os meum non est clausa; numquam’ (my mouth isn’t closed; never’ which is horrible. Not that Trump would turn down a gift of a coat of arms with that as the motto)
Thanks for that, Tigger. I have about seven hours left of my working day, nine of which will now be spent drawing Trump coats-of-arms.
“Mens insana capram”
Latin pig goat of arms?
Maybe if flexed a little.