Richard Ellis/ZUMA
Ben Carson has some thoughts on gun control.
Less than a week after the massacre at an Oregon community college that left 10 people dead, including the shooter, the Republican presidential candidate dismissed renewed calls for gun safety and called for kindergarten teachers to be armed.
“If I had a little kid in kindergarten somewhere I would feel much more comfortable if I knew on that campus there was a police officer or somebody who was trained with a weapon,” Carson told USA TODAY on Tuesday. “If the teacher was trained in the use of that weapon and had access to it, I would be much more comfortable if they had one than if they didn’t.”
Carson’s calls to arm teachers echoes similar views expressed by GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who suggested the Oregon shooting could have been avoided if school officials were armed. “Let me tell you, if you had a couple teachers with guns in that room, you would have been a hell of a lot better off,” he told an event in Tennessee.
The proposal comes just one day after Carson also suggested during a Facebook Q&A that enacting gun control laws would be more “devastating” than the results of gun violence:
“As a Doctor, I spent many a night pulling bullets out of bodies,” he wrote on Monday. “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.”
The talk of arming teachers from Trump led Comedy Central comedian Larry Wilmore to respond on his Monday night show: “Let’s not elect a guy who’s getting his policy ideas from the movie Kindergarten Cop.” Watch below:
