Earlier this week, Ben Carson made some comments about the mass shooting at an Oregon community college that raised some eyebrows, to put it politely. To CNN, Carson said that if he were face-to-face with a gunman, he’d “much rather go down fighting”; he also told a Sirius XM radio show an odd story about an instance when he was, in fact, confronted by a man with a weapon while living in Baltimore.
“Guy comes in, put the gun in my ribs, and I just said, ‘I believe that you want the guy behind the counter.’ I redirected him,” Carson said. Yesterday, also on Sirius XM, Carson finished the story: “The resolution was, [the gunman] said, ‘Oh, sorry,’ and then he went to the appropriate person behind the register who gave him the money, and he left the store running before the police got there.” The Baltimore Police Department said they have not been able to find a police report for the incident Carson described because he didn’t provide enough information.
Carson’s critics were rankled by comments they saw as blaming the victims of the shooting for getting shot.
But whether or not the Republican currently in second place in the polls would stand up to a hypothetical gunman is probably a moot point; less irrelevant, however, is how he would handle the debt ceiling. Alas, Carson had a rough time with that one this week, too.
