Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson’s latest objectionable historical observation – and old-fashioned victim blaming – is that the Holocaust would have been “diminished” if the Jews had carried guns. Carson’s comment not only betrays his ignorance of twentieth century European history – the Jews in Europe did take part in armed resistances, even in the Nazi’s worst death camps –but it also reveals a troubling tendency in current American social dialogue to deny the existence and reality of true “victims” throughout history.

Ben Carson claims Jewish people might have stopped Holocaust if they had guns Read more

By the same reasoning as Carson’s, enslavement in the American south could apparently have been avoided if Africans could have simply taken their masters’ guns. But they did revolt, and often at that, though it took the US Civil War to end the enslavement of black people in the United States. By the same reasoning, the Cambodian genocide would not have happened if the famine-wasted Cambodians had trained their guns on the Khmer Rouge. And there should be almighty peace in every active war zone in the world because they all have guns, guns and more guns on every side.

You don’t have to be Hegel or Marx to know that slavery, genocide and wars are tragic, systemic, structural problems that infect societies at the intersections of race, ethnicity, religion, class and other vectors of social and political identity. They are not passing fads that could be fixed with a trip to the gun expo. The Syrian refugees dying on European beaches and asking for refuge in European nations did not end up where they are because they could not shoot guns at the forces hunting them down. They are victims of circumstances and forces much more powerful, immoral and brutal than the apocryphal “bad man with a gun” who can be stopped by a “good man” with the same.

The denial of “victimhood” to those who have suffered atrocities is one of the reasons Carson has traction with a particular group of voters rooting for him – and those who advocate for unfettered, unregulated gun ownership are just one part of that constituency. Rather than identifying Americans’ easy and even vaunted access to firearms as a leading cause of mass shootings, gun rights advocates would rather blame gun violence on mental illness, bad parenting and other factors other than the cheap and easy availability of guns. There are no victims of guns, they say, just victims of circumstance – or, as Republican Congressman Trent Franks said on Friday after the campus shooting in Arizona, victims of rules that prevent everyone from carrying guns.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 6 controversial views from the good doctor.

We don’t even let victims identify what they were victimized by. It appears to be against our “can-do” ethos. No wonder we show them so much disrespect. The term “victim” appears to some people to denote passivity, a lack of agency, the abdication of personal responsibility in putting an end to their victim status. Anti-victim talk is the dominant tone of the self-help industry: television talk show host Dr. Phil’s second “life law” in the Ten Life Laws is “Don’t play the role of victim, or use past events to build excuses. It guarantees you no progress, no healing, and no victory. You will never fix a problem by blaming someone else.”

Victims often have had something unconscionable done to them, either at random or because of systemic social failures. So we look for reasons to discount the randomness of their experiences, or reasons to mitigate the systemic forces that underlie the violence. And then, if we can’t find reason to discount their initial victimhood, we tell them to bootstrap their way out of it. We want to make them different from us, so that we can be secure in our feeling that we ourselves can never become victims.

It’s all redirection – something Carson understands well. He has said that he once directed a gunman to go for the “the guy behind the counter” during a hold-up at a Popeye chain. He made himself not a victim; he’s never identified what happened to the victim he helped create. Maybe it doesn’t matter what happened to the victim because Carson thinks he was smart enough to get out of the way. Carson doesn’t believe in evolution, but it seems like he certainly believes in survival of the fittest.

Carson embodies the trend in American politics to abandon people to the mercy of market forces with no safety net. In this kind of political climate, victimization has no sociological scaffolding; it is the result of your personal choices, and bad choices at that. Victims are self-made. They’re choosing to be victims instead of victorious.

Carson’s comments about the Holocaust, gun violence and victim blaming boil down to this: admitting the existence of “victims” of gun massacres would require any self-respecting politician to do something about it. But if Carson and his Republican comrades-in-arming can turn the responsibility of anyone’s death by gun violence back on them for not having had a gun, too – as though re-creating the Wild West is a sound national policy –well, then, there are no problems to fix. The smaller government they say they want need not take action; let the (gun) market determine who survives.