ATLANTA (AP) – Republican presidential contender Ben Carson has a simple solution for preventing a Paris-style attack at one of his campaign rallies: “If a bunch of terrorists came in here and there were people in here with guns, it would be very unlikely that they would be able to carry about the kind of massacre they did in Paris.”
But there’s a snag in that approach – the demands of the Secret Service agents now protecting him, at his request (and at taxpayer expense). They don’t allow any guns except those carried by authorized personnel.
At Carson’s rallies as well as Donald Trump’s, there’s a dissonance between the faith they put in the hands of armed citizens to keep public events safe and the Secret Service protection they rely on for their own security.
To be sure, a campaign rally with a polarizing candidate on stage – or any candidate – is not the same as a soccer stadium or nightclub like the ones attacked in Paris. The Secret Service began protecting certain candidates in presidential primaries after the killing of Robert Kennedy in 1968, which followed the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, out of fear that more political figures – not just presidents – would be targeted.
Yet for the public, political rallies to which the agency is assigned are decidedly the “gun-free zones” that Trump has explicitly called for ending and that Carson supports doing away with, too, judging from his rhetoric.