Gun-toting Liberty University president: 'If more people had guns, we could end those Muslims'

A university president has encouraged all his students to get a gun permit in the wake of a mass shooting in California last week.

Jerry Falwell Jnr, who admitted that he was "packing" while addressing thousands of students at Liberty University in Virginia, said that if more people had guns, they could "end those Muslims" before they attack.

Receiving loud cheers from students when he revealed what he had in his back pocket, Falwell Jnr criticised president Barack Obama and the anti-gun lobby in the US.

It just blows my mind when I see the president of the United States say that the answer to circumstances like that is more gun control.

If some of those people in that community centre had had what I've got in my back pocket right now...

Is it illegal to pull it out? I don't know.

Anyway, I've always thought if more good people had conceal carry permits then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them.

Explaining his comments to the Washington Post, Falwell Jnr clarified that he did not mean "all Muslims", but just those who planned attacks.

The shooters of a community centre in San Bernardino, who killed 14 people last week, are thought to have pledged allegiance to Isis.

But Ibrahim Hooper, of the Council on Islamic-American Relations, told CNN that Falwell's comments added to a "ramping up" of anti-Muslim rhetoric across the US:

It's part of an overall toxic anti-Muslim atmosphere that we're seeing, particularly in the past few weeks with Paris and San Bernardino.

Anti-Muslim bigotry was still on the fringes after 9/11. But it's moving toward the mainstream thanks to Donald Trump, Ben Carson and these type of comments.

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