Ben Carson doubled down Wednesday on his comments about standing up to a shooter such as the one in Oregon last week, commenting that he wants to "plant in people's minds" what they should do in a similar situation.
"Unfortunately, this is probably not going to be the last time this happens," Carson said on the
"CBS This Morning" program. "From the indications that I got, they did not rush the shooter. The shooter can only shoot one person at a time. He cannot shoot a whole group of people. And so the idea is overwhelm him so everybody doesn't get killed."
Carson is being criticized after telling Fox News' "Fox & Friends" Tuesday that he would
"probably not cooperate" with a shooter, and he "would not just stand there and let him shoot me."
He admitted to CBS News that he did not recognize the name of
Chris Mintz, the Army veteran who took seven bullets trying to tackle the Umpqua Community College shooter, Chris Harper-Mercer, in a bid to save his terrified classmates, but said Mintz did "exactly what should be done."
"If everybody does that, the likelihood of him killing as many people diminishes," Carson said.
And while Carson is being accused of being insensitive to the Oregon victims, he responded by saying that the nation lives "in a culture that people decide everything you say, and we need to set up battle lines and we need to get on this side of it or that side of it."
However, he continued, people don't want to work to collectively figure out how to solve a problem, which he called an "immature attitude," but something that seems to be prevalent in the United States.
Carson, as a retired neurosurgeon, said that the nation's leaders can fight back against the ongoing series of mass shootings in the country by determining the common factors between the shooters.
"In medicine, we have a tendency to make decisions based on evidence, not on ideology," he said. "Let's say this were a disease. What we would be saying is let's take each one of these shooters and let's go back and let's study their lives, and let's see if we can see some commonality."
Further, he believes that there needs to be steps taken to recognize the mentally ill and take appropriate interventional steps, and keep guns out of the hands of people who have been declared as dangerous individuals by a mental health professional.
"We need to study all of the possibilities and we cannot do anything that compromises the Second Amendment, but as long as we keep in mind we don't want to compromise the Second Amendment, we also want to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people," he said.