Donald Trump suggested that the Orlando nightclub massacre might not have ended so tragically had clubgoers been armed.
“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 waste, or right to their ankle, and this son of a bitch comes out and starts shooting, and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes boom, you know what, that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks. That would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight,” Trump said Friday at an event in The Woodlands, Texas.
Despite Trump’s claims on June 15 that there were “no guns on the other side” in the mass shooting in Orlando, there was an armed security guard working at Pulse nightclub the night that Omar Mateen opened fire, killing 49 people and injuring 53 more.
Adam Gruler, a 15-year veteran of the Orlando Police Department working security for Pulse nightclub that night, exchanged gunshots with the gunman near the club’s entrance.
At his campaign rally in Atlanta, the presumptive GOP nominee for president said there would’ve been fewer deaths “if the bullets were going in the other direction, aimed at the guy who was just in open target practice.” Adding the U.S. needs to accept immigrants who “don’t want to destroy us, that don’t want to go to a club where you have innocent people, and where you had no guns on the other side.”
According to a statement by the Orlando Police Department on June 12:
According to the Orlando Sentinel, at least two Orlando Police Department officers responded to the scene within minutes and fired at Mateen before he retreated to a club bathroom with hostages.
He was met by gunman Omar Mateen. Armed with a .223 caliber AR type rifle and a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, Mateen started exchanging gunfire with the officer.
Gruler quickly realized he was outgunned and called for backup. Gruler retreated and Mateen ran further inside the club.
Lt. Scott Smith and Sgt. Jeffrey Backhaus arrived a couple minutes later and rushed into the club. There was another flurry of shots between them and Mateen.
According to a new study, researchers found a 7.8 times higher risk of ambulance calls for patients with trauma in areas with the highest density of bars and restaurants licensed to serve alcohol, compared to a low density of such establishments, reports Eurekalert.
The findings, by Dr. Joel Ray, a physician at St. Michael’s Hospital and a researcher in its Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, were published today in the journal Medicine. The study was conducted in Peel Region near Toronto, but Dr. Ray said the results are relevant to other jurisdictions.
Dr. Ray also found that EMS calls for assaults near a bar or restaurant peaked dramatically at 2 a.m., when the sale of alcohol must stop in the province of Ontario. Such calls nearly tripled at the end of the month when monthly paycheques are often deposited.
The study determined the risk of EMS calls in association with the density of bars and restaurants service alcohol in Peel, where all on-premise and off-premise alcohol establishments are licensed by the provincial government and the legal drinking age is 19.
The study found the relationship between the density of licensed alcohol establishments and EMS calls for trauma ranged from 45.3 per 1,000 calls in areas with no on-premise licensed alcohol establishments to 381 per 1,000 in areas with the highest density of such establishments.
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