Falwell urges students to pack heat

He then said the university offers a free course to help get a concealed carry permit.

Falwell advised students to take the university’s free class for concealed-carry permits so they could be prepared to counter such attacks as the one in San Bernardino that left 14 dead and many seriously injured. “Islamist terrorists is what I meant”, and “@anaprah I was referring to “those Muslims” that just carried out attacks in Paris and California”.

“It just blows my mind when I see that the president of the United States that the answer to circumstances like that is more gun control”, Falwell said, according to the newspaper.

The stadium-sized crowd broke out into applause. “If some of those people in that community center had had what I’ve got in my back pocket right now…” “Is it illegal to pull it out?”

“I’m not backing down”, he said. “If anything, we need more people with concealed carry permits”, he said. Falwell also tweeted that he had received a wave of support for his comments.

“That’s the only thing I would clarify”, Falwell told the Post.

On Virginia talk radio program, Falwell said he’d make the exact same comments again.

“It was clear [during Convocation] I was talking about radical Islamic terrorist Muslims, not all Muslims”, Falwell said in an email to TheBlaze. He cited the 2007 killing of 32 people at Virginia Tech, the deadliest mass shooting in modern USA history. “Countless lives could have been saved”, he said.

“I think they’re so exhausted of being told they’re the problem because they have guns and because America is a country that has gun ownership”, he said.

“I would hope that – God forbid – there was a shooter in a classroom, that one to two students or faculty that were carrying a weapon would be able to protect themselves”, he said. The school’s annual graduation ceremony has become a pilgrimage destination for Republican candidates (and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders) seeking to build bridges to conservative Christian voters. The Christian collage is closely aligned with conservative politics, but is at odds with major religious groups, who overwhelmingly favor stricter gun safety measures.

Polls suggest that evangelicals are the largest religious group in the country most resistant to gun-control laws.