Ben Carson does not like to admit he was wrong. Really, really doesn't like it, on a Donald Trump level of never admitting you're wrong. The more he runs for president, the more we get the chance to see that. Case in point: Carson is doubling down on his victim-blaming in the recent Oregon mass shooting. See, if Carson had been there, he would have organized resistance and overcome the shooter, not just waited to be killed like all those other idiots. (I may be paraphrasing/translating a touch here.) Did Carson rethink this position when it was pointed out how grossly insensitive it was not just to the Oregon victims but to the victims of all the other American mass shootings of recent years?
Nope. He went on Fox News to tell Megyn Kelly this:
CARSON: Of course, you know, if everybody attacks that gunman, he’s not going to kill everybody. But if you sit there and let him shoot you one by one, you’re all going to be dead. And you know, maybe these are things that people don’t think about, it’s certainly something that I would be thinking about.
KELLY: But don’t you allow for that notion that in a time of great stress like that, one might not know exactly what to do. And to judge them, to sound like you’re judging them –
B. CARSON: I’m not judging them at all, but, you know, these incidents continue to occur. I doubt that this will be the last one. I want to plant the seed in people’s minds so that if this happens again, you know, they don’t all get killed.
It's a nice fantasy to think that you'd be the uniquely brave person in the room. I bet it's a fantasy most of us have indulged: "I'd be the one with the presence of mind to rush a shooter. I'd be the one to risk myself for others. I'd be the one to have tackled the 9/11 hijackers." But until we are facing the gunman or the hijacker, we have to realize that that is a fantasy, and that there's a reason these acts of courage happen so rarely. Ben Carson doesn't realize this. He either takes for granted that of course he's that rare beacon of courage, or he really thinks that 99 percent of people in that situation are just gutless sheep.
But to be fair, Carson isn't saying he'd rush the shooter alone. He's saying he'd organize everyone to do so together. Because talking over gunfire to get panicked people to act in effective unison, knowing that some of them will be killed in the process, is such a breeze. Which leads me to wonder: is this the one place in American politics that Ben Carson sees value in collective action?
