Response to Death Wish

(See: Just Above Sunset: Death Wish)

A confession: I dissent.

I think everyone's making way too much of a deal about what Ben Carson thought he would have done if faced with a shooter, and how Trump defended him. And this, of course, is not because I'm a big fan of either of them. In fact, just the suggestion of the remote possibility of one of these guys actually becoming president gives me hives.

The contention is that Carson was insulting the shooting victims for not fighting back? Except that, for something to be an insult, it has to be intended to be one, and it's pretty obvious it wasn't. When I first heard him say what he would do, I remember wondering the same thing; could that work? Could I even have the time to convince everybody to rush the gunman, or would I be dead after saying five words? What is one supposed to do in that situation?

It did not occur to me that victims and their families would take this as criticism, or that he was calling them cowards. I tend to think that this is a case of people who are angry at all Republicans (as well they should be) for their defending the right of gunmen, in essence, to go into schools and shoot people to death, refusing to give Ben Carson any slack.

In fact, what Carson said on his FaceBook page is, to me, much more damning:

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. Serious people seek serious solutions. The Left would prefer to use these tragedies to advance a political agenda. To me, that is also devastatingly sad. The Left would have you believe that a man that asked Christians to stand up (and then executed them one by one) would obey “new gun laws”. That kind of logic explains many of the problems we find ourselves in today.

What exactly does this even mean? He wishes these bullet-riddled victims had more gunpower to keep from getting shot? He's glad that whoever shot these people had a constitutional right to own the guns they used to shoot them? And the question is not whether the bad guys would "obey" those new gun laws, since we wouldn't be demanding they do, we would be forcing whoever sold the guns to obey those laws. So I have to, once again, agree with Carson on something he said on his website, above:

That kind of logic explains many of the problems we find ourselves in today.

But don't get me started on Carson, who I sense is sort of a mild-mannered crockpot, and maybe even nuttier than Trump. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Defending Carson. I just wanted to say that the demand that we all be so sensitive to everyone's sensitivities puts too much of a crimp on our ability to talk these things out, and it shouldn't.

And no insult intended, but I still wonder what I would have done if I came face to face with someone exercising their Second Amendment right, who was threatening to kill me.