There is no evidence that Ben Carson is anti-gun. None. His words were twisted by the media - and they got the results they were looking for - people on conservative forums, and social media bearing false witness.
Carson's own words.
“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.”
“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.”
Asked by one call participant whether he would support convicted felons being allowed to possess guns after serving their time, Carson said it would “depend on what kind of criminal activity they were convicted for.” He added, “Is this somebody who is still considered a danger to society? If that's the case, they probably still should be in prison.”
Carson said a “mental patient” or someone with “history of violence” shouldn't be able to own “anything” to “wreak havoc on society.” That, he said, could be part of a “reasonable” gun-control law. The government also shouldn't “retrospectively” go back to make once-legal guns illegal, he said.
