Ben Carson, a famed neurosurgeon and political novice who’s running for president and doing well in GOP polls, opined that if a madman pulls a gun and opens fire on a crowd we’re in, we should all rush the gunman, because he can’t kill us all and enough of us are likely to survive to get him.
In military combat, this kind of self-sacrificing heroism often earns the Medal of Honor. So Carson, in effect, is asking ordinary citizens to be Medal of Honor heroes, who even among seasoned combat soldiers are a very rare breed. (Carson, by the way, was offered an appointment to West Point, but turned it down and never served in the military. Born in 1951, he’s old enough to have fought in Vietnam, but didn’t, and he doesn’t know a damn thing about facing enemy fire.)
Now let’s introduce Melissa Duclos. She’s a writing teacher in Oregon, and the mother of a 5-year-old boy. She wrote a letter to legislators who, like Carson, think the “solution” to madmen shooting up public places is for citizens to brave lethal fire and neutralize heavily-armed attackers. She thinks these legislators are cowards for knuckling under to the gun lobby instead of passing sensible gun control legislation that might help to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. She doesn’t like the fact her son is being put through lockdown drills and “has to be prepared to hide out of the line of fire,” or that people like her are being told “to fight for our survival,” because “you, our lawmakers, haven’t done your jobs.” Read the story here.
Duclos nailed it. The rationalizations for inaction on the proliferation of guns in American society, and their deadly misuse by people who obviously shouldn’t have them, offered up by gun-rights supporters like Carson are beyond incredulous. They’re stupid and insulting.
In fact, there were armed students on the Umpqua campus, but to a man, none of them confronted the gunman or tried to shoot it out with him. The anti-gun-control crowd is trying to spin this inconvenient fact away with various explanations, such as the false claim that college policy prohibited guns inside buildings. The college has such a policy, but with qualifying language reflecting the fact it’s overridden by state law, which the spinmeisters deliberately ignored. A number of permit holders were, in fact, packing concealed guns inside campus buildings that day.
No, it wasn’t college policy that kept them from using their guns. The real reasons they didn’t play Wyatt Earp and shoot it out with the gunman were (1) they didn’t want to get shot by the arriving police SWAT teams, who might mistake them for the shooter; (2) the risk of hitting innocent bystanders; and (3) it would be much harder for police to figure out who the shooter was in the confusion of a shooting melee behind him and other students.
It’s not unreasonable to add that (4) it’s unreasonable to expect ordinary citizens to be heroes. Sometimes they are, and in fact, there was a spectacular hero at Umpqua: An unarmed student who, doing exactly what Carson suggests, rushed the shooter — and survived being shot seven times trying to protect his fellow students. But this is not a normal reaction to a such a situation, and isn’t something we can ask or expect of ordinary people.
Ben Carson was fine doctor, a groundbreaking surgeon, who’s lived a spectacular life and accomplished great things in his field. But that doesn’t qualify him to be president, and his lame defense of unrestricted gun ownership demonstrates how incompetent he is when thinking and talking about public policy issues that impact all of us. I would be happy if he stuck to what he knows, medicine, and left political leadership to people who know what the hell they’re doing.
Photo: Melissa Duclos, who teaches creative writing at Clackamas Community College in Portland, Oregon, is more qualified to be president than Ben Carson is, because she’s in touch with ordinary people and can think sensibly and rationally about issues like mentally ill people having access to guns.