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News Columnists Gromer Jeffers Jr.

Confident Carson opens up about guns, Syria and more

Published: 12 October 2015 10:39 PM
Updated: 12 October 2015 11:28 PM

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson is an improbable front-runner for the Republican nomination for president.

In most polls, he’s second to billionaire Donald Trump, as GOP voters are now favoring outsiders with no political experience to seasoned politicians or elected officials. But Carson’s candidacy has not been without controversy.

In recent weeks, his statements promoting gun rights have stirred outrage, including his comment last week on CNN that the Holocaust would have been “greatly diminished” if Jews had guns.

In a recent telephone interview, Carson told me that the media and his political adversaries are trying to distort his positions, and he’s confident voters understand what he’s about. We also discussed his new book, A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties.

Carson will promote the book next week in Fort Worth and Plano. In the meantime, here’s what he had to say about several issues:

On the relevance of his book to the presidential contest:

“The founders of our nation said that our freedoms and our systems are based on a well-informed and educated populace. If we have anything other than that, the nature of the country would quickly change because people would be very easy to manipulate.

“One of the things I wanted to do with this book is to help people understand what their rights and privileges are and also understand what the limits of the government are. The document was supposed to ensure the rights of the people and to restrain the government.”

On preventing mass shootings like the recent rampage in Oregon:

“We need to be looking at the profiles of these shooters to see if we can glean some early warning signals from them, so we can identify such people and get help for them before the tragedy occurs. We need to make sure we don’t have these areas where people are very vulnerable, a school, a campus, an army recruiting base, that are gun-free zones. ... These nuts, they’re not so nutty that they want to go to a place where they are going to get killed. That’s why they look for these gun-free zones.”

On whether more guns are the answer:

“We need to be thinking about how we can protect our people. We have retired policemen, we have army personnel and we have even people who can be trained, civilians to be able to use appropriate weapons to protect themselves. So we need to be thinking about how do we identify these people early and how we protect ourselves? But what we don’t need to be doing is taking guns away from people.”

On his controversial comments about the Holocaust:

“That’s not controversial. That’s logical. Throughout the history of the world, before dictators take control, they generally disarm the populace. The same thing happened in Germany. Why is that controversial?”

On the crisis in Syria and the emergence of Russia as a player in the region:

“We should be resisting all of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s efforts. When his generals say, ‘We don’t want you guys flying here,’ we should say, ‘Take a flying leap.’ We should establish our own no-fly zone, and we should enforce it.

“We need to understand why he is there. He said he was coming there to fight ISIS, but who is he fighting instead? I believe he is attempting to establish a presence there that will be his beachhead to further spread throughout the Arabian peninsula, and the whole general region, because he wants to control the energy there. With the price of oil being so low, it’s hurting him tremendously. If he can control large areas of energy production in the world, he can rectify that pretty quickly and then that will give him the resources that he needs to really intensify his efforts to re-establish an empire.”

On media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s comment that, unlike Barack Obama, Carson would be a “real” black president:

“He was simply trying to say Obama seemed to be like the Messiah for black people, but it turns out that his presidency hasn’t resulted in any improvement, and in fact it’s gone backward. He was thinking that someone like myself, who could identify strongly with what happened in the black community, might have a better idea to ameliorate the situation of all the who are the downtrodden and ostracized.”

GOP forum at church

Six Republican presidential contenders are scheduled to attend a sold-out forum Sunday afternoon at Prestonwood Baptist Church.

The event, sponsored by the church and the Faith & Freedom Coalition, features former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Candidates in both parties were invited.

Dr. Jack Graham, Prestonwood’s pastor, will question the candidates during the forum.

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