Ben Carson Criticizes Oregon Victims For Failing To ‘Rush The Shooter’
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson already got himself in hot water regarding the Oregon massacre after saying that it would be “more devastating” for American’s to lose their second amendment right than to see a mass shooting occur. Now Ben Carson is taking his controversial statement about the Oregon tragedy a step further by essentially holding the victims accountable for their own deaths.
According to ABC News, Ben Carson spoke to CBS This Morning about how he would have handled the shooting massacre differently if he were there.
“From the indications I got, they did not rush the shooter,” Ben Carson said. “The shooter can only shoot one person at a time, he cannot shoot a group of people.”
Ben Carson has received a wave of backlash over these comments, which some people interpreted as an excuse to stave off gun control laws in the wake of yet another devastating mass shooting. Instead of re-evaluating gun laws in America, Republican candidates like Ben Carson are seemingly thinking of another explanation for the massacres besides making guns harder to get.
“I said what I would do…. I would ask everyone to attack the gunman,” Ben Carson added. “That way we wouldn’t all end up dead.”
Another excuse Ben Carson seemed to give for the shooting is the failure of people to recognize the mental issues within the shooters before they go on their rampage.
“They key thing to do is look at all of these shooters and see what we can glean in terms of their personalities in terms of what kinds of behavioral circumstances they have had in the past. There are warning signs.”
As Addicting Info reported, regardless of the effectiveness of gun control, Ben Carson essentially used an argument that many call “blaming the victim,” wherein a person finds a fault committed by the victim as a way to explain why the crime took place — instead of holding the criminal wholly accountable. He made the same argument on Fox and Friends.
“Not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me,” Ben Carson said. “I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.'”
Ben Carson says victims should try to take down a shooter together. This while voters collectively fail to stop his candidacy.
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) October 7, 2015
Others have also criticized Ben Carson for failing to account for the terror of the moment, which makes it almost impossible to know how you would react in a life-threatening situation without actually being there.
Like many Republican candidates have said in the past, Ben Carson also believes arming more Americans with guns is the answer to stopping gun violence. He’s stated that giving kindergarten teachers firearms to protect the students is a more viable answer than making firearms more difficult for mentally unstable people to purchase.
According to Politico, when confronted about his criticism of Oregon victims, Ben Carson defended himself by declaring America has “a culture now where people decide that everything you say, we need to set up battle lines and we need to get on this side of it or that side of it, rather than collectively trying to figure out how we can solve the problem. It’s sort of an immature attitude, but it seems to be something that’s rampant in America today.”
Meanwhile, Ben Carson has actively attacked President Barack Obama for failing to find real solutions to the gun control problem.
“When do we get to the point where we have people who actually want to solve our problems rather than just politicize everything? I think that’s what the American people are so sick and tired of.”
Do you agree with Ben Carson?
[Image credit: Justin Sullivan / Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images; Yahoo News]
