“I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say: ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’ ” -- Ben Carson on Fox News, October 6, 2015
“I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed. I’m telling you that there is a reason that these dictatorial people take the guns first.” -- Ben Carson on CNN, October 9, 2015
Ben Carson holds many views that seem incompatible with being a physician. His defense of creationism, which involves wholehearted attacks on evolution and Big Bang theory, is one. Another, his weak-kneed support of childhood vaccination schedules, is especially concerning coming from a man who is not just a neurosurgeon, but a pediatric neurosurgeon.
His comments about guns, which on the surface seem to have little to do with medicine, also betray a thinking alien to a physician's training.
Telling the public that the Oregon shooting victims should have fought back is a way of blaming the victim. It is tantamount to saying that if you are killed in a mass shooting, you were too weak or cowardly to fight back. Gun-toters, in comparison, as this smarmy logic goes, are self-starters -- bootstrap people. Folks who would never put up with being shot.
As with his creationism nonsense, Carson's gun argument makes a joke out of logical thinking. They are certainly not the words of a man well-versed in scientific principles. The idea that the Jews would have survived the Holocaust if they had guns may be material for a bad "what if" science fiction novel, but it is neither science nor responsible fiction. There is no evidence for it, and it is not the kind of statement a person trained in evidence-based science would make. It is using a fairy tale in support of a public policy statement, and it is extremely sloppy thinking, even by political standards.
Ben Carson styles himself as a physician-politician, outside of Washington politics. As a president with a physician's sensibilities, he would be expected to apply the best information available to craft effective government policy. Isn't that his selling point? Instead, with his gun arguments he shows that he intends to base national crime policy on science fiction. This foolishness makes a joke out of politics, and out of his medical degree.
In my years as a practicing physician, I have taken care of many dying patients. One problem I have come up against, as has any doctor who seriously engages with the dying, is the patient with a terminal illness who thinks he has a moral duty to fight to the bitter end. This determination to fight, while often beneficial in the early stages of a battle, can be detrimental in the end. Patients often get tired, and if they could come to terms with death and decide to spend their few remaining days enjoying the time they have left and making peace with the inevitable, they would end their days more happily.
I have often treated patients whose bodies were riddled with cancer, truly at the end, who suffered needlessly because they couldn't give up, because they feared that giving up was a moral failure.
Losing a battle with cancer is not a moral failure. We all have to die one day. No less than 100% of the people in history, no matter how heroic, have died. No less than 100% of the living will also die one day. Dying is a part of life. It is what humans do.
When Ben Carson says the people who died should have fought back, he is tapping into that guilt. He is telling people that to die is to fail. This is not a statement anyone who ever practiced medicine with compassion would make.
A doctor would know that it is wrong to judge people who have died as failures. To say this is to deny the very purpose of medicine. It is to forget that the role of a doctor is not to save lives at all costs, but to help people live more comfortably and happily, and to help them accept that there is no shame in dying when dying finally comes.
I have to assume, based on what the media tell me, that Ben Carson once practiced legally as a physician.
But what kind of physician could he possibly have been? Certainly one without compassion for the dying.