Ben Carson likes guns. And he likes people who like guns. And he likes people who like people who like guns. For those of us who don’t like guns, he has no patience. He had no sympathy with those killed last week at Umpqua Community College—if you’re not armed, he complained, it’s your own fault. And he has scant sympathy for Jews killed in the Holocaust. If only Jews had been armed, “the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished.” Makes sense. All the Jews needed to do to defeat Hitler was to organize a comparable military force; let’s say about 10 million men under arms, along with 670,000 tanks and armored vehicles, 1.3 million artillery pieces, and about 230,000 combat aircraft.

Carson has a magical belief in the efficacy of guns to solve problems. It’s a very American belief. Those who know how to handle a gun learn not to ask permission, but just to do what needs to be done. Learning how to use violence can be redemptive, purifying, a red badge of courage, turning quivering boys into calm and controlled men. It is a very romantic view of guns, the violent daydreaming of people who lead placid civilian lives.

If you want to see violence in action, Dr. Carson, turn your attention to East Jerusalem, where violence is solving nothing. For Palestinians violence is just a means of protest, which all of the protestors know will be futile, will accomplish nothing, might get themselves killed, but is the only way to be heard. The Occupation is well into its 48th year, and the violence is being led by a generation that has grown up since Oslo, and trusts no institution and sees no way out of their dilemma. When they are peaceful they are ignored. When they throw rocks, they are shot at and arrested. All the alternatives for the Palestinians are equally poor.

For the Israelis there is a belief that violence can permanently keep the Palestinians at bay, and that if violence doesn’t work, the only solution is more violence. And Israel is planning more and more punitive measures against protestors—mandatory sentences for teenage rock throwers, house demolitions, expulsions, revocation of residency or even citizenship rights, checkpoints in East Jerusalem, an area with hundreds of alleyways and corridors.

There is fear on both sides; Israelis fear random stabbing attacks; Palestinians fear that merely being an Arab will be enough to attract a hostile mob and possibly fatal attacks by the mob, the police, and the army. The fear of the oppressors and the fear of the oppressed are different fears, but right now fear is the only thing Israelis and Palestinians have in common. And the one thing that both sides know, at least intuitively, is that whatever the problems between them, it will never be solved by violence. And it is something that Ben Carson, and people who think like him, will never understand.