Ben Carson Already Killed Baby Hitler, Twitter Jokes: Reaction To Jeb Bush's Statement

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush says that were he given the opportunity, he would go back in time and kill baby Adolf Hitler in his crib. “Hell yeah, I would!” the former Florida governor told Huffington Post Monday. “You gotta step up, man.”

The original question sparked a viral discussion last month when the New York Times Magazine polled its readers, “If you could go back and kill Hitler as a baby, would you do it?” The results of the poll revealed that 42 percent of readers would kill the future German dictator, 30 percent would not and 28 percent were not sure.

Bush did recognize that there is no way to foresee how the course of human history would have changed if Hitler had died as a baby in Austria in 1889 and whether World War II would have been avoided.

“It could have a dangerous effect on everything else, but I’d do it -- I mean, Hitler,” Bush said, shrugging, the Huffington Post reported.

Meanwhile, many Twitter users joked that that rival GOP candidate Dr. Ben Carson, whose accounts of his past have been questioned, had already stabbed baby Hitler, and debated what Donald Trump would have done if confronted with the opportunity.

This is not the first time this election cycle that World War II has entered the political discussion; Carson had come under fire last month for claiming that if Jews had taken up arms against the Nazis, the Holocaust might have been avoided. The statements came in the wake of a massacre at an Oregon community college, and were heavily criticized.

"I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” Carson said last month, CNN reported. "I'm telling you there is a reason these dictatorial people take the guns first."