Ben Carson reacted to the shooting of ten people at an Oregon community college last week by warning that it would be used as “an excuse to grab people’s guns.”
“My thinking is that we’re not going to use that as an excuse to take people’s guns, that’s ridiculous, guns don’t kill people,” Carson told Iowa conservative radio host Jan Mickelson on Friday.
Carson also falsely claimed that the shooter targeted the college because it was “a gun-free zone.” The school was in fact not a gun-free zone and several students on campus were concealed carrying at the time of the shooting.
Later in the interview, Carson cited a fake Thomas Jefferson quote to claim that gun regulations don’t work:
The people who want to get rid of our gun rights, I want them to tell me how exactly that stops these kinds of incidents from happening. Because the people who are going to commit these crimes, they don’t care about your silly rules, they’re not going to pay attention to them. So all you’re going to do is create more vulnerability, as Thomas Jefferson said. He said the people who are going to be disadvantaged are the ones who are law-abiding.
The passage to which Carson seems to be referring was actually written by am 18th century Italian philosopher ; Jefferson transcribed the passage in a notebook, and historians disagree on what his thoughts on it were.
