Dr. Ben Carson said Sunday that the war of words over the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement amounts to “political correctness going amuck,” arguing that the conversation around police violence against African-Americans should be “a little more mature.”
“If you hire a plumber and he does a bad job, do you say all plumbers are bad? Let’s go out and kill them? I don’t think we do that,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, reiterating an argument that he made in the wake of the Baltimore riots earlier this year. “We need to be a little more mature, but certainly in cases where police are doing things that are inappropriate, I think we ought to investigate those promptly and justice should be swift.”
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Carson, who is the only African-American in the Republican presidential field, said that Democrat Martin O’Malley should not have apologized to black activists after saying “black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter.”
“That’s what I’m talking about is silly,” Carson said. “Of course all lives matter, and of course we should be very concerned about what’s going on, particularly in our inner cities.”
Carson also defended his position that undocumented immigrants should be able to achieve legal status, saying that those advocating for mass deportation “have no idea what they’re talking about and how much that costs and how impractical that is.”
Asked by moderator Chuck Todd if Carson’s opponents would brand his position as “amnesty,” he replied: “They can call it whatever they want to. But we also have to be pragmatic.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com
Carrie Dann