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Enough?

Dr. Ben Carson hosts conference call to 'clarify' his 2nd Amendment stance



Last year, Dr. Ben Carson did some substantial damage to his constitutional credentials by suggesting that the 2nd Amendment was somehow limited by a citizen's geographic location. Asked where he stood on gun ownership, he told Glenn Beck:
“It depends on where you live. If you live in the midst of a lot of people, and I’m afraid that that semi-automatic weapon is going to fall into the hands of a crazy person, I would rather you not have it.”
Carson went on to say that if you lived “out in the country somewhere by yourself” he had "no problem" with you owning a semi-automatic weapon. Obviously, this didn't sit well with strict constructionists who are well aware that God-given rights are not subject to the location of your residence. Would Carson argue this way about the 1st or 4th Amendments? Of course not. So, Carson took a bit of a beating.

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Since then, he's tried - multiple times - to clarify his initial remarks but the explanations have never truly managed to undo the original damage. If he's going to make a White House run, that residual ambiguity isn't going to fly. So, Wednesday night, he hosted a conference call for his supporters in which he tried, again, to strengthen his position. As Bloomberg Politics reports:
“There seemed to be group of people—I don't know exactly who they are—who seize upon one part of something that I said,” Carson said on the call, which Bloomberg Politics was allowed to dial into. “Sometimes people just hear one little thing and they don't hear anything else.” Carson said that he could have been more precise in his answer to Beck. “Perhaps I didn’t convey it appropriately,” he said. “I wanted to convey that, you know, I've lived in urban areas. I've worked in urban areas. I've seen a lot of carnage, and I'd prefer a situation where the kinds of weapons that create that kind of carnage don't fall to the hands of criminal elements or insane people. But that is secondary to the desire to always defend the Second Amendment.” Carson said that “under no circumstances” would he “allow a bureaucrat to remove any law-abiding citizen's rights for any kind of weapon that they want to protect themselves.” If he were in a position of national leadership, Carson said he would seek to allow people to possess any kind of weapon they can legally buy, including “automatic weapons and semi-automatic weapons.”
That's quite a boomerang. What do you think? Has he gone far enough to erase your doubts?


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