Ben Carson thinks he knows what he would do if he found himself face to face with a mass murderer pointing a gun at him.  He would try, he said, to rally those with him and rush the gunman.  He assumes he would behave like a character played by Bruce Willis in an action film.  He's wrong.
     Donald Trump supported Carson's comments in a tweet.  The two men, both running for president,  a position implying gravitas, seem to think they know how they'd react if a maniac with a gun, bent on killing as many people as possible, were to point the weapon at them with obvious deadly intent.
     Macho statements are easy to make from the comfort of the couch on the set of Fox and Friends.  Carson will likely never be in the position the students menaced and killed in Oregon were last week. He's a gun rights advocate.  Better than chastising Congress and gun lobbies for allowing the chronic misinterpretation of the Second Amendment to continue, Carson prefers to say the shooting victims in Oregon should've handled things differently.  He may as well have said they should've contracted flu and not gone to school that day.
     The Second Amendment speaks of the necessity of not preventing citizens from owning firearms due to the possibility, far more real then than now, of invasion from without, as happened in the War of 1812.  With their own guns, citizens could be formed into militias to help fight off enemies.  I wonder about Second Amendment enthusiasts of our time, defending even irresponsible gun-related laws.  That anyone can buy an assault rifle is, in my opinion, an egregiously bad idea.  That NRA mentalities won't budge even in the face of children being slaughtered, as in Newtown, and preach a pro-gun dogma, as does Carson, is insane.
     I'd like to ask Second Amendment lovers if they'd really like to do what the language of the Amendment calls for citizens to do: join a militia in case of invasion.  Would Carson or Trump really be willing to join a militia and actually fight for their country?  Trump, old enough to have been drafted during the Vietnam War, received deferments then, like that other non-combatant patriot, Dick Cheney.  Like Newt Gingrich.  In the past, these men proved they weren't willing to fight for their country.  Why would they fight now?
     Carson finds it easy to make a few remarks on what he would do.  Anybody can say, "I would do this..."  What isn't easy is feeling the nerve-twitching intensity of a real deadly situation and then acting in a heroic manner, as a young student, also a military veteran, did in Oregon, rushing the gunman and getting shot multiple times.  Carson didn't know about this until Norah O'Donnell on CBS told him.  He said that just proved his point, but what I saw was a presidential candidate with more feeling for bullets than for the people whose relatives and friends were murdered.  We can't ask them what went on in their minds before they were shot to death, but with imagination we can do a better job than Carson and Trump, wondering about what can be done in a narrow field of choices amid the sounds of gunfire, screaming, and the shaking hell of panic.

                                                                               Vic Neptune