A presidential candidate urges people to commit suicide
by digby
Carson:
CARSON: Of course, you know, if everybody attacks that gunman, he’s not going to kill everybody. But if you sit there and let him shoot you one by one, you’re all going to be dead. And you know, maybe these are things that people don’t think about, it’s certainly something that I would be thinking about.
KELLY: But don’t you allow for that notion that in a time of great stress like that, one might not know exactly what to do. And to judge them, to sound like you’re judging them –
B. CARSON: I’m not judging them at all, but, you know, these incidents continue to occur. I doubt that this will be the last one. I want to plant the seed in people’s minds so that if this happens again, you know, they don’t all get killed.
I don't know what to say about this guy anymore. His endorsement of torture was bad enough. This is psychotic. And he doesn't seem to have a clue that it's psychotic.
As Steve Benen points out:
At its core, this comes down to breathtaking arrogance. Look again at what Carson said on Fox News last night about running at the gunman: “[M]aybe these are things that people don’t think about, it’s certainly something that I would be thinking about.”
Right. Of course. Carson, who’s never confronted with such a terrifying nightmare, feels certain that he knows exactly how he’d respond when staring down the barrel of a gun held by a madman. He knows what he’d be thinking and how he’d respond – and Carson sees this imaginary hero within as a model for everyone.
For those who have the nerve to suggest such shallow bravado is callous, Carson is inclined to “laugh” at “their silliness.”
I wrote about this earlier for Salon and as the day goes on I see that with every mass shooting of innocent people, these gun zealots are getting more and more callous. It's beyond simple ego and macho fantasy. It is now officially a cult which is defined as "a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object."
The object they worship is the gun. And the innocents, even small children, who are being killed are blood sacrifices to their idol.
Carson is literally advising people not to use common sense in a situation like this, not to adhere to a gunman's demands in the hope they will be spared, not to play dead or otherwise try to survive. He's encouraging people to rush into live fire as the best way to save lives. It's as close to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as it gets. They are becoming what they despise.
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I'm beginning to think he's more dangerous than Trump. It's certainly scary that nearly 50% of Republican primary voters are supporting one of the two of them.
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