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Donald Trump Carries a Gun, and Says He Would Have ‘Opened Fire’ to Stop Paris Massacre

The migrant crisis will lead to the collapse of the European Union, Paris is over, and the Bataclan concert hall massacre is the result of French people not being allowed to carry guns on a Friday night. That’s what, in summary, Donald Trump says in the latest issue of conservative French weekly Valeurs Actuelles, which will hit newsstands Thursday.

In the bombastic interview, which has already been summarized by several French news outlets, Trump says that he never leaves the house without a gun, and that, had he been present at one of the sites where 130 people lost their lives on November 13, things might have turned out differently.

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“I can tell you that if I had been at the Bataclan or in one of the cafés, I would have opened fire. I might have died, but I would have drawn [my gun],” Trump was quoted as saying in the interview by French news site 20 Minutes.

“Do you really think that if there had been a few armed and trained people in the audience, things would have turned out that way?” Trump continues. “I don’t think so. They would have killed the terrorists. It’s good sense.”

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In its own summary of the interview, French radio news channel France Info described how Trump characterized the Bataclan shooting as an “open bar” massacre, similar to “shooting pigeons.”

With these comments, the US presidential hopeful is recycling earlier thoughts on the attacks that terrorized France last year. 

“Isn’t it interesting that the tragedy in Paris took place in one of the toughest gun control countries in the world?” Trump tweeted in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January.  Trump’s statement spurred France’s ambassador to the US to compare the real-estate mogul turned presidential hopeful to a “vulture.” 

Speaking at a campaign rally in Beaumont, Texas, the day after the November 13 attacks, Trump said the situation would have been “much, much different” if France had more lenient gun laws.

As well as taking a shot at France’s gun laws, Trump couldn’t help but muse about the ineluctable decline of France and French society. 

“Unfortunately, France is not what it was, and neither is Paris,” he said, with a vague reference to “the lost territories of the republic” — presumably the same “no-go zones” highlighted by Fox News in its much-ridiculed exposé of the French capital in 2015, which stated that entire areas where immigrants, mostly Muslim, live had become off limits.   

Many may disagree with Trump, including international tourists, who kept France at the top of the world’s most popular tourist destinations in 2015.

But just as Trump has “at least 20 Muslim friends,” he also has French friends, who are diligently feeding him intelligence on the social issues blighting the country. 

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“My French friends say they sometimes have the feeling that they aren’t really at home when they go about here and there in their country,” he told Valeurs Actuelles.

But things are not only bad in France. Europe, according to Trump, is also teetering on the brink of collapse and is “heading for revolutions.”

“If the situation isn’t dealt with competently and firmly, yes, it’s the end of Europe,” he told journalist André Bercoff.

Valeurs Actuelles is touting the interview — which was brokered by mutual friends of Trump and Bercoff’s — as the candidate’s first official interview in Europe.