Washington: In another controversial remark, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Sunday said that the US should start thinking about racial profiling to prevent incidents like the mass shooting in Orlando.
Citing the example of Israel and other countries in this regard, 70-year-old Trump argued this is not the worst thing to do.
“Well I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” Trump told the CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ in an interview.
“Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully. And I hate the concept of profiling but we have to start using common sense and we have to use our heads,” he argued.
Trump’s comments come one week after 49 people were shot and killed in a gay nightclub in Orlando, the deadliest mass shooting in US history. Following the massacre, Trump renewed his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US.
During the interview, Trump, said horrific incidents like Orlando shooting could be prevented if the Muslim community would report suspicious things.
“When you look at people within the Muslim community and where people are living and they don’t report, and a good example of that would be San Bernardino,” he said.
“I mean, they had bombs all over their apartment floor and people saw it and nobody reported them, and 14 people were killed, many injured,” he added.
Trump said Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, had red flags before the attack.
“You look at his past, I mean? I’ve never seen a past quite like that. You look at his record in school, you look at a lot of other things. There were a lot of red flags, this was not a very good young man,” he said.
Trump said he is working with the National Rifles Association (NRA) to develop a policy that people on no fly list would not be allowed to buy a gun.
“We understand there are problems with that because some people are on the terror watch list that shouldn’t be on. So I’m working with the NRA, we’re discussing it and again the NRA has the best interests of our country, it just has the absolute best interests of our country,” he said.
