Ben Carson is a horrible person, part whatever.
Look, I want to stop talking about Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson even more than you do, I really do. But that can't happen until Dr. Ben Carson shuts his yap and stops with the increasingly personal attacks on
the victims of actual shootings.
“I’m not complaining about any of the victims,” the Republican presidential candidate said in a CNN interview. “I’m trying to plant the seed, because this may not be the last time that this occurs. If it occurs again and there’s a bunch of people, they might start thinking, ‘You know what? We’re not going to just take this.’”
The comment came in response to Wolf Blitzer’s question about a statement made by Matthew Downing, one of the survivors of the Oregon shooting. Downing said on Facebook that “nobody could truly understand what actions they would take like that in a situation unless they lived it.”
Carson speculated that Downing’s comments were “fed to him” by someone who misconstrued what he meant when he said he would have risen up to attack the shooter.
Oh for Christ's sake, the man simply said that you don't necessarily know what you'd do "in that situation" until you were actually in it—which is consistent with what every last Actual Combat Expert-Type Person has been saying over and over, and not a damn attack on Carson's precious theories that if
he was in a mass shooting situation, he'd (blam) save the day (blam) through the power of friendship and (blam) the world's deadliest trust exercises. Umpqua Community College mass murder survivor Matthew Downing was not
fed anti-Ben Carson talking points by shady anti-Ben Carson figures, because Umpqua Community College mass murder survivor Matthew Downing doesn't need coaching as to what his goddamn opinion of surviving a mass murder might be. He's got his mass murder ticket punched—I have no idea what Downing's personal thoughts on
anything are, but he ought to be one of the few people in America that even Ben Carson and the NRA are obliged to admit have some skin in this particular game.
For Dr. Ben Carson to suppose all of that was just a buildup to some anti-Ben Carson force maybe marginally insulting Dr. Ben Carson is self-absorbed even by Dr. Ben Carson standards.
Oh, but he's still keen on this idea that the only way we're going to stop mass shootings in this country is by teaching all our school children and college students to bum-rush the shooter until he runs out of bullets to keep murdering them with.
Blitzer also pointed out that not everybody has the experience to rise up and attack a gunman. But Carson said that a school in Virginia came out with guidelines after a shooting which included “throwing everything you could possibly throw at the shooter.” [...]
Carson’s comments are actually contrary to government protocol. The Department of Homeland Security recommends attempting to evacuate or hide before attacking a shooter — something that should only be done “as a last resort, and only when your life is in imminent danger.”
Yeah, that'll work. When faced with a man holding three handguns and a rifle, throw things at him. And hopefully your school supplies will incapacitate the bad man, kids, because if it doesn't you're now going to be running from a homicidal maniac who's pissed off that you threw things at him.
There are two kinds of Republican politicians in America today. The ones that know when they have said something stupid and, perhaps with the help of their advisers and a ball gag, clam up about it and hope it blows over, and the ones that believe the answer to saying something stupid is to keep saying even stupider things until somehow it all works itself out. Guess which one is currently in vogue.