Ben Carson said Sunday he's heard from several people in the Jewish community who have told him he was "exactly right" on his comments linking the Holocaust to gun rights, and that's "generally agreed" that it is difficult for a government to dominate a population that is armed.
"Look at the whole content in which I have said that and which I have written about that,' he told NBC's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd. "I wrote about societies, before tyranny as able to take root, that the tyrants tried to rid the people of the mechanism to defend themselves. So it was said in that context."
The retired neurosurgeon also accused the media of twisting his comments to "try to make this into a big, horrible thing."
"If I say something about something that we don't want to become and we never even want to get close to it, then I'm comparing it and I'm saying we're there," said Carson. "That's what they do. And, of course, for people who aren't really thinking deeply, you know, that resonates. But, you know, the fortunate thing is a lot of people really do think for themselves, as you can see, you know, from the poll numbers here."
But as a result, there have been people who have taken his statements and turned them into an "anti-Jewish thing, which is foolishness"
"I think it is generally agreed that it's much more difficult to dominate people who are armed than people who are not armed," said Carson.
Carson also doubled down on his stance that there should never be compromises on the nation's Second Amendment.:
"Noah Webster said that America would never suffer under tyranny because if people were armed," he told Todd. "So we need to keep that in mind. Of course, we should be thinking about what can we do to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of mentally unstable people. The two things are not incompatible."
However, he insisted that does not mean there shouldn't be limits on what kind of weapons Americans should be able to buy, meeting Todd's jab that "should somebody be able to have one of these surface-to-air missiles."
"When we put this amendment in place, you know, state-of-the-art weapon was what? A musket?" Carson said. "But the principle was that the citizenry should have, you know, access to whatever they needed in order to protect themselves from an overly aggressive government."
And as far as missiles, Carson pointed out that he doesn't think anyone can get one legally in this country, as "we have laws that, you know, take care of that."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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