Ben Carson, GOP presidential candidate: ‘I have plenty of energy’

Ben Carson on Sunday pushed back against Donald Trump’s claim that he lacks the energy to be president, as he defended Second Amendment rights and said he would “love to see” the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion overturned.

Mr. Carson stunned Mr. Trump by overtaking him in a pair of polls in Iowa, the vital starting point in the race for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

Mr. Trump, the real estate mogul who largely had withheld attacks on Mr. Carson until now, joked that the retired neurosurgeon was sleeping when the news came down.

“I have plenty of energy. But, you know, I am soft-spoken. I do have a tendency to be relaxed,” Mr. Carson told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I wasn’t always like that. There was a time when I was, you know, very volatile. But, you know, I changed.”

He then methodically worked through a series of prominent GOP issues with NBC host Chuck Todd, pushing back against people who reacted strongly to his suggestion that an armed populace might have resisted Nazis in Germany.

“I think it is generally agreed that it’s much more difficult to dominate people who are armed than people who are not armed. You know, some people will try to take that and, you know, make it into an anti-Jewish thing, which is foolishness,” he said.

He also said the Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion a national right should be overturned, though he said he could be open to legalizing abortion in cases where the life of the mother is at risk.

“That’s an extraordinarily rare situation,” Mr. Carson said. “But if in that very rare situation it occurred, I believe there’s room to discuss that.”

He ruled out exemptions in cases of rape or incest.

“Rape and incest, I would not be in favor of killing a baby because the baby came about in that way,” he said. “And all you have to do is go and look up the many stories of people who have led very useful lives who were the result of rape or incest.”