Dr. Ben Carson, world-renowned neurosurgeon, and a 2016 GOP presidential candidate, has launched a social media response effort to the Oregon gunman’s reported targeting of Christians in his shooting spree on a community college campus on Thursday.
One among the several continuous Facebook posts, Dr. Carson requested his millions of followers to change their Facebook photograph to an image of a hashtag portraying #IAmAChristian. Few other Facebook photograph shows Carson holding up a paper with the words “I am a Christian”written on it. Please consider changing your profile picture to honor the victims and their families,” Carson wrote under the one with the hashtag photograph.
“Yes, #IAmAChristian,” Carson writes under the one with the photograph of him.
An eyewitness of Thursday’s shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon said that the killer, named by police as Chris Harper-Mercer, asked students about their faith and executed those who professed to be Christians.
“A gunman singled out Christians, telling them they would see God in ‘one second,’ during a rampage at an Oregon college Thursday that left at least nine innocent people dead and several more wounded, survivors and authorities said,” the New York Post reported.
The Post quoted Stacy Boylen, a woman whose daughter was wounded in the shootings, to detail exactly how the gunman targeted Christians: “[He started] asking people one by one what their religion was. ‘Are you a Christian?’ he would ask them, and if you’re a Christian, stand up. And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you are going to see God in just about one second.’ And then he shot and killed them.”
Democrats, along with the President Barack Obama, have seized the shooting as an opportunity to push for more gun control. But Carson has instead put the focus on mental health issues in America–and now on the fact that the shooter reportedly targeted those of Christian faith.
“Well, obviously, there are going to be those who are going to be calling for gun control,” Carson said in an interview with Hugh Hewitt on Thursday. “But you know, that happens every time we have one of these incidents. Obviously, that’s not the issue. The issue is the mentality of these people. And we need to be looking at the mentality of these individuals and seeing if there are any early warning clues that we can gather that will help us as a society to be able to identify these people ahead of time.”
