Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson told Fox News on Tuesday morning that he’d have taken a different approach if he had been approached by the Oregon shooter.

“Not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me,” Carson told Fox & Friends on Tuesday in response to a question about how he’d have handled the gunman in a hypothetical situation. “I would say: ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me but he can’t get us all.’”

In one of his signature Facebook Q&As Monday night, Ben Carson again weighed in on the Oregon shooting, writing that he had operated on victims of gun violence “but I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.”

Responding to a questioner who asked whether the tragedy had altered his position on the Second Amendment, Carson suggested new gun-control laws wouldn’t solve the problem and accused Democrats of “us[ing] these tragedies to advance a political agenda.”…

The GOP presidential contender first weighed in on the shooting last week, telling reporters in Iowa that the solution should be to collect data on shooters to try to find “early warnings” to prevent future cases, not stricter gun laws.

“You’re not going to handle [the issue] with more gun control because gun control only works for normal law abiding citizens, it doesn’t work for crazies,” he said then.

If he were president, Ben Carson would not visit Roseburg, Oregon, in the aftermath of last week’s deadly shooting, as President Barack Obama is scheduled to do on Friday. The Republican presidential candidate also slammed Obama for his call on the same day of the shooting to politicize the event that killed nine people at Umpqua Community College, in hopes of finally getting momentum for gun control legislation.

“Imagine a politician politicizing something,” Carson remarked during an interview with “Fox and Friends.” When do we get to the point where we have people who actually want to solve our problems rather than just politicize everything? I think that’s what the American people are so sick and tired of.”

Carson’s argument synced up perfectly with the one made by the National Rifle Association since the 2012 killings in Newtown, Conn. The NRA emerged from the debate over gun violence with a National School Shield Task Force, chaired by Asa Hutchinson, who’s now the Republican governor of Arkansas. Its report inaugurated a new NRA program to offer gun training to school safety officer. “As more [armed] officers have been assigned to schools, school death rates have decreased,” argued the task force. “These numbers support the notion that the presence of armed officers positively impacts the school environment.”

The NRA’s lobbying and the Republican victories of 2014 were boons to the cause of arming campuses. This summer, Texas passed sought-after legislation to allow students to carry guns. But as the Oregonian reported, and as many presidential candidates have ignored, the campus where the shooting occurred was not a gun-free zone. That’s left Carson and others speaking hypothetically about how more guns might have changed the calculus on campus, and aggressively cultural weakness for allowing the conditions for the killings…

The common thread in each interview, from three men seeking to own the social conservative lane of his party, was that natural, constitutional gun rights required a more moral America. In his interview with Page, however, Carson said that his own views on gun ownership grew more laissez-faire once he started “getting more into the history of this country” and considered how an unarmed citizenry could be at risk.

“There is no doubt that this senseless violence is breathtaking,” Carson wrote, “but I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.”

Try, for just one moment, to put yourself into the mind of the man who wrote that. According to the same Facebook post, he’s seen first-hand the devastation bullets can do to the human body. Imagine seeing those bodies, operating on them, sewing them up, watching some of them die – and then saying that taking away a gun is somehow more devastating than gun violence itself…

How could anyone look at a tragedy like this one, or at the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, or the nine dead in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and not want to take action? How could anyone’s first instinct – or second or third – be to protect the guns that caused the deaths, instead of preventing the next shooting?…

He accuses “the Left” of playing politics, and indeed we should – we should do whatever it takes to keep Carson and anyone else who denies the human suffering caused by this nation’s senseless gun laws out of the White House.

In an interview with Business Insider, Dr. Carson suggested developing a massive database of “dangerous people” who should not own a firearm.

In the case of both the shooter in Aurora and the one at Virginia Tech, there was evidence that these were dangerous people. And that could be easily in a database. We have the mechanism for doing stuff, but we have to act on it. Common sense will tell you that you’re not going to put dangerous weapons in somebody’s hands like that. That seems like a big part of our problem. Common sense — we don’t seem to have it anymore…

Dr. Carson’s plan might have stopped the Virginia Tech shooter and the Aurora Theater massacre, perhaps, if those who have been treated for mental illness are denied a weapon, as Dr. Carson’s plan calls for. It wouldn’t have stopped the Oregon community college shooter, unless there is any additional evidence uncovered that would show the killer had encountered any mental health treatment (instead of claims by someone that the shooter might have had mental health issues, an item that wouldn’t register on a Dr. Carson database). It wouldn’t have stopped the Charleston church slaughter, unless the shooter could be denied a weapon over illegal drug possession and trespassing at a mall (unless Dr. Carson calls for this as well).

Moreover, knowing that mental health hospitalization would cost a person the ownership of a gun, people would act to make sure they never encountered a mental health official or institution.

Under any circumstances, this would be a despicable thing to say, like when a Republican state legislator said something similar about the victims of the Charleston shooting in June. It’s particularly disgusting in this case because we know for a fact that at least one victim did try to fight back, and so little is still known about the other victims’ and survivors’ experiences.

Those who were killed can’t tell us what was going through their minds as the gunman shot them down, but unless you’ve ever been in that situation, you don’t really have a goddamned thing to say about it. They may have been hoping for a chance at the killer when he stopped to reload, or thought better of rushing him because it might accelerate the killing, and instead hoped that they could keep him talking until help arrived. With six semiautomatic weapons and a steel-plated vest, he actually could “get them all,” and rushing the guy could have gotten more people killed.

Or maybe they were all human beings who were terrified, and reacted in the only way they could to a coward who herded them into the center of the room to cut them down. If there’s a God, maybe He gave them the peace and courage to face their fate. Maybe he told them “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid,” or to “fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

One of the victims, Sarena Dawn Moore, was a devoted Seventh-Day Adventist like Ben Carson, yet Carson smears all of them as cowards, with nothing to back it up but his own grandiose self-delusion. I wasn’t there, either, but I know for a fact that the only coward in that room was Chris Harper Mercer.

“If I had a little kid in kindergarten somewhere I would feel much more comfortable if I knew on that campus there was a police officer or somebody who was trained with a weapon,” he says. Including the teacher? “If the teacher was trained in the use of that weapon and had access to it, I would be much more comfortable if they had one than if they didn’t.”

He says the idea of declaring gun-free zones may be counterproductive. The gunmen “tend to pick places that are gun-free zones,” he says. “They aren’t likely to go into a place where they are likely to get shot.”…

While Carson once supported the idea of banning assault weapons and armor-piercing ammunition, he says he changed his mind after he read more about the history of tyranny, a subject explored in his new 240-page book.

“Reading people like Daniel Webster, who talked about tyranny in Europe and said it would never occur in America because the American people were armed,” he says. “When you look at tyranny and how it occurs, the pattern is so consistent: Get rid of the guns for the people first so you can go in and dominate them.”