Carson: I faced a gunman


GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson, under fire for his advice about what to do when facing a gunman, late Wednesday recounted the time when a gun was pointed at him.

{mosads}“I have had a gun held on me when I was in a Popeyes,” Carson told host Karen Hunter on SiriusXM radio, referencing an incident at a Baltimore fast-food restaurant.

“[A] guy comes in, put the gun in my ribs,” he added. “And I just said, ‘I believe that you want the guy behind the counter.’”

Carson elaborated further on the tense encounter during a second appearance on Sirius XM Radio on Thursday.

“The resolution was, he said, ‘Oh, sorry’ and then he went to the appropriate person behind the register who gave him the money, and he left the store running before the police got there,” he said on “The Michael Smerconish Program” that afternoon.

“I own firearms [but] I don’t carry them,” Carson said. “In circumstances like that, even if I were carrying a firearm, I wouldn’t use it.”

“Some people think that just because you have a firearm you’re going to be irrational and you’re going to be using it,” he added. “I don’t think that’s the case.”

“I wasn’t fearful for my life at all. I knew why he was there.”

Carson sparked outrage on Tuesday by arguing that he would have physically attacked the shooter during last week’s rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore.

“Not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me,” Carson said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”

“I would say, ‘Everybody attack,’” he added. “’He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’”

Critics said that Carson’s remarks were insensitive.

Carson has repeatedly argued since the Oregon shootings that gun violence does not justify stricter gun control.

“There is no doubt that this senseless bloodshed is breathtaking – but I never saw a body with a bullet hole that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away,” he wrote on his Facebook page Monday night.

Tags Ben Carson Gun control

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