At Univision’s town-hall-style event Wednesday, 33-year-old Jesús González asked Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump: “Could you explain your gun control policy to the parents of the victims of school shootings?”

Trump’s response to those parents: They’re better off in a country with more guns.

“We have a Second Amendment and right to bear arms, essentially,” Trump said. “And I’m very strongly an advocate of that — I think you need that. I think that if you ever tried to get rid of it, you wouldn’t be able to do it. You wouldn’t be able to take away the guns, because people need that for security. They need it for entertainment, and for sport and other things — but they also, in many cases, need it for protection.”

Trump echoed former National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre’s famous argument that if more “good people” have guns, it helps keep crime down.

“You want to have a lot of good people have [guns],” the former president said. “But if we didn’t have that, you would see a crime rate that’s crazy.”

Southern and Mountain West states with more permissive gun laws tend to have higher death rates from gun violence than those of the Northeast or California, where gun restrictions are tighter, according to research from the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University.

Trump did not mention school shootings in his two-minute response, but he repeatedly accused his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, of wanting to take Americans’ guns away.

“She wants to take everybody’s gun away, you know she’s always wanted that,” Trump said. “That’s because, uh, that’s what she wants. She wants to take everybody’s gun. You know who will never give their guns up? The bad guy. The bad guy’s not giving up the guns. So that’s what we have. We want safety, we want security, but you have to still adhere to the Second Amendment.”

Harris said at their only presidential debate last month that both she and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are gun owners and do not want to take firearms away from law-abiding gun owners.

Both the Harris campaign and gun reformers seized on Trump’s remarks for prioritizing gun owners’ “entertainment” over the safety of schoolchildren.

“What a disgusting, soulless answer,” tweeted California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Harris ally.

“Yesterday, Former President Trump made clear again that he only cares about making his gun lobby friends rich, not the children being killed every single day in this country,” Vanessa Gonzalez, vice president of government and political affairs at Giffords Law Center, which focuses on gun violence issues, wrote in a statement. “He has no plan, or even a concept of one, to stop this public health crisis.”

Trump, a former gun owner, can no longer legally own firearms because he has been convicted of a felony.