Retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson told the National Rifle Association on Friday that a gun is a "baton of freedom" in America and that gun-rights supporters must battle to extend the right to future generations.
"For hundreds of years, the people in America have had guns — and for hundreds of years, the people in America have been free," Carson said at the association's annual convention in Nashville, Tennessee. "What we must now recognize is that the baton of freedom is in our hands. The question is, what are we going to do with it?
"Are we going to submit to the secular progressives who try to use every opportunity to get rid of our guns?" Carson posed. "Or are we going to recognize that, in order for the next generations to enjoy the same freedoms that we have, that we have to exercise the same kind of courage that people had before us?"
Carson, who also is a Newsmax columnist, was among many possible 2016 Republican presidential candidates speaking at the NRA's Leadership Forum as part of the association's three-day convention.
The event, which ends Sunday, is expected to draw as many as 70,000 to the Music City Center in downtown Nashville.
He told the crowd that the Second Amendment remained crucial to the nation's security because "there are people who are watching us all over this world.
"They're called radical extremists, Islamic terrorists — and they are going to get in here anyway that they can," he said. "And when they get here, we need to be able to fight them — particularly if we have an administration that won't fight them — we have to be able to fight them ourselves."
But the right is also necessary so that the American people "would be able to defend themselves against an overly aggressive government that wanted to exact tyranny in this country," Carson said. "We don't ever want to see that happen."
Carson slammed Obama for using sequestration to shrink the U.S. Navy to "its smallest size since 1917" and "cutting beyond the fat into the muscle and the bone.
"We're in danger of becoming a regional Navy when we have to be able to project power all over the world. We have international interests, but a Navy that is shrinking.
"It's a perfect storm; we cannot let that happen. We have to get new leadership.
"We need to understand that freedom is not free," Carson concluded. "You have to fight for it every single day."
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