Eagles of Death Metal singer: ‘Until no one has guns, everybody has to have them’

The lead singer for Eagles of Death Metal, the American band playing at the Bataclan theatre in Paris when it was attacked by terrorists last year, said living through the massacre convinced him that everyone should own a gun.

Jesse Hughes was already a National Rifle Association supporter and a gun enthusiast before the Nov. 13 shooting, which killed 90 people in the theater. In an interview with French television station iTele, he was asked whether the experience had changed his mind about gun-control laws. “Gun control doesn’t have a thing to do with it, but since you brought it up, did French gun control stop a single f—ing person from dying at the Bataclan?” he replied.

If anything, he said, the incident only convinced him that the solution was more guns. “I think the only way that my mind has been changed is that maybe that until nobody has guns, everybody has to have them.”

Eagles of Death Metal is playing a show tonight at the Olympia theater in Paris, a performance intended to reunite many survivors of the November attack. Hughes choked up and appeared shaken as he described the concert’s symbolism.

“I did an interview … where the interviewer said, ‘It’s brave of you to come back,'” he said. ” I disagree with that. What’s brave is to get in a Metro car and … walk through the streets and come to the show.”