Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Republican presidential candidate, retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, many in the Jewish community have supported his point of view linking the Nazi gun control efforts and the ease with which they were able to round up Jews. After the October 1, 2015 mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, Carson said Hitler would not have attained his goals as easily if the Jews were armed. “There’s a reason these dictatorial people take the guns first,” Carson said, and caught much flak for it.

“Some people will try to take that and, you know, make it into an anti-Jewish thing, which is foolishness,” Carson said, adding that many in the Jewish community have told him he was exactly right.

Carson, who said he would “love” to see abortion becoming illegal nationwide with few exceptions, with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, told NBC’s Chuck Todd: “I’m a reasonable person and if people can come up with a reasonable explanation of why they would like to kill a baby, I’ll listen.”

He did concede possibly allowing abortions to preserve the life of the mother, saying, “That’s an extraordinarily rare situation, but if in that very rare situation it occurred, I believe there’s room to discuss that.”

Carson is leading the Republican field in recent polling. A Friday Des Moines Regisiter/Bloomberg poll shows him with a nine-point lead in Iowa. A Quinnipiac University poll Thursday gives him an eight point lead over Donald Trump in Iowa.

Alluding to the hatchet job much of the media, as well as his chief rival in the race, billionaire Donald Trump, have done on him, Carson said: “As people get to know me, they know that I’m not a hateful, pathological person like some people try to make me out to be. And that will be self-evident. So I don’t really worry about that.”

As to the attack from Trump saying he has “super low energy,” Carson said, “I’m not sure that there’s anybody else running who has spent 18 or 20 hours intently operating on somebody.”