Presidential Candidate Ben Carson. Image: OutdoorHub.com
Like the Donald, Ben Carson does not have the voting record of a career politician. Heck, that’s probably a good thing. I might even vote for a can of spackle over most any career politician. Since we can’t look at voting records in Candidate Carson’s case, we’ll take a close look at what he’s said over the years, and then you can decide where you think he stands.
Carson is a man born of humble beginnings. His mother, with only a third-grade education, understood the value of learning and encouraged young Ben to invest in reading, He did, and by high school, became quite the student and earned admission to Yale University. After graduation from Yale, Carson did what it took to pay the bills. According to his campaign information, “after graduation, Ben would work as an X-ray technician, a bank teller, a school bus driver, a supervisor for highway cleanup crews, and a crane operator in a steel factory, before being accepted into The University of Michigan School of Medicine.” Most people know his background as a neurosurgeon and rise as a political voice over the past several years. Now, based on the latest polls, he’s a serious contender for a Republican nomination.
What he says in favor of the Second Amendment.
Like Candidate Trump, Candidate Carson also has staked a Second Amendment Claim policy in writing, although the former brain surgeon has elected to pursue an economy of words approach. According to his campaign website (www.bencarson.com) his views on the Second Amendment boil down to this.
It was no accident that our Founding Fathers enshrined the right to own firearms as the 2nd element of the Bill of Rights, immediately after establishing our free speech rights. I cannot and will not support any efforts to weaken The 2nd Amendment.
The 2nd Amendment is a central pillar of our Constitution. Our Founding Fathers added it explicitly in order to protect freedom in the United States of America. It provides our citizens the right to protect themselves from threats foreign or domestic.
While the historical context is accurate, the Carson campaign kept the written message brief, and, therefore, subject to future re-interpretation. That’s OK, and even understandable from a presidential hopeful, so we’ll dig deeper into his history of verbal commentary on the subject.
Recently, Carson’s public speeches and comments on gun issues have zeroed in on the purist reasoning for the protection of the Second Amendment. That would be the inherent check and balance between the populous and the government elected to represent them.
At the 2015 NRA Annual Leadership Meeting, Carson aimed to communicate his stance on the Second Amendment. “Just for the record let me make it extremely clear that I am extremely pro-Second Amendment. There’s no question about it. I would never allow anybody to tamper with that right because it is so important.”
What I don’t like is his constant lies in his biography. I don’t understand why he needs to lie about his life. He has a very compelling life story already, why does he need to claim he was a gangbanger?
It makes me feel that he isn’t forthright with a lot of things. He might be sucking up to us gun people with his rhetoric, but with his track record of lies, I am very much skeptical of his actual beliefs.
There are real pro-2A candidates in the primary, but I don’t know if Ben Carson is one of them.