Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is full of advice as to what America should do about guns, or more to the point what America should
not do about guns. He doesn't think the president should visit with the families of the latest mass shooting. He doesn't think politicians should be "politicizing" the event by talking about ways to prevent it. He has two main ideas, and the first is that if
he were facing down one of America's proliferating crazy mass murderers, he would stand up real straight and
refuse to be shot.
"Not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all,'" he told the hosts.
Sorry, victims of Sandy Hook and Aurora and Umpqua and Charleston—you did it wrong. If Ben Carson had been there he could have saved the day, but he wasn't. An oversight on his part.
His other big idea is the usual one.
"If I had a little kid in kindergarten somewhere I would feel much more comfortable if I knew on that campus there was a police officer or somebody who was trained with a weapon," Carson continued.
And when asked if teachers should be armed, he replied, "If the teacher was trained in the use of that weapon and had access to it, I would be much more comfortable if they had one than if they didn't."
Which always strikes me as curious; let's take the teachers the good Ben Carson's party have spent the last three decades spitting on, cutting their pay, busting their unions, calling them incompetent, making them pay for basic supplies, and so on, and now make them the front line quasi-military force protecting their little tots from being murdered by violent lunatics who, the party insists, have the perfect right to buy guns for shootin' kids if they damn well can plunk down the money to do so. So do the teachers need to purchase their own guns, or will those be provided? Will there be an increase in pay involved? The teacher will need to keep that loaded gun in close proximity if it is meant to do any good at all, not locked up or unloaded—so when a student gets their hands on it, as happens frequently with all the other objects in the classroom, whether the children are "supposed to" or not, is there a liability waiver involved, or what?
And then there is The Lesson. You should know by now that Dr. Ben Carson is a sponge for conservative radicalism and conspiracy theories, and cites one of the most pathological conservative voices of the last century as an inspiration. Everything Dr. Ben Carson has to say about gun violence appears to be near-direct quotations of the conservative prevailing wisdom of the moment, i.e. things he read in his emails, and The Lesson is no different. The Lesson is that America's various murdered children are necessary sacrifices. It's meant to be this way.
Dan, I grew up in the slums of Detroit. I saw plenty of gun violence as a child. Both of my cousins were killed on the streets. As a Doctor, I spent many a night pulling bullets out of bodies. There is no doubt that this senseless violence is breathtaking – but I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.
So there won't be any solutions, unless those solutions involve (1) bringing even more guns to more places or (2) telling the victims to grow a spine and fling themselves at the nation's various mass shooters in an effort to bury them under as many corpses as is necessary to foul their plans. As usual. He's no deep thinker, Dr. Ben Carson, but he has the standard-issue mass murder talking points down cold.
