Earlier this month, Ben Carson spoke at the “Bridging the Gap Quarterly Leadership Series” in Spartanburg, South Carolina, an early primary state, where he fielded a question about his previous statement that people in cities don’t have the right to own semi-automatic weapons. The likely GOP presidential candidate insisted that the NRA — whose convention he recently addressed — straightened him out on such views.

Carson said that people in cities need guns to defend against Big Government gun confiscations and potential attacks, even going so far as to suggest that ISIS wouldn’t have made such advances in Iraq if there were more firearms in the country.

He also claimed that Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher and “Leviathan” author, knew that tyranny “would never occur in America because American citizens have guns and they won’t let it happen.” Hobbes, of course died in 1679, a century before the U.S. was established: