Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 11:19 am
Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America
That’s what Larry Pratt,the executive director of Gun Owners of America, wants. Pratt, you might remember, was the target of Piers Morgan’s ire the day he got himself put on a petition for his deportation by saying Pratt was “an unbelievably stupid man.”
Piers Morgan nailed that one, as events proved, not that it’s any great surprise given Pratt’s past history, including a stint as director of Pat Buchanan’s campaign co-chairman in 1996, when he tried to organize white supremacists and militia leaders on behalf of the racist Buchanan.
Now Pratt, who denies being a racist (I’m sure it’s just a joke we liberals just don’t get), sees the twice-elected President Barack Obama as a dictator whose “administration seems to view the American people as the enemy.” He compares Obama to King George III, an accusation sure to resonate with gun-toting Tea Partiers.
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But it is Larry Pratt, who in December suggested eliminating gun-free zones as a means of protecting the American people from people with guns. It is Larry Pratt who, appearing on Fox News the other day, argued against expanded background checks on gun purchases.
It sounds to me as though it is Larry Pratt who sees us as the enemy; a herd to be culled at best.
According to Pratt, who appeared on Crosstalk with televangelist Vic Eliason of the VCY America Radio Network, Obama should be impeached if he signs ”an executive order to take away our guns.”
Never mind that neither Obama nor Biden are proposing taking away people’s guns.
Never mind that there are plenty of things Obama can do to with executive orders that are perfectly constitutional, by the way, without involving Congress.
Never mind that the Second Amendment is speaking to a militia that no longer exists, as these days America has a standing army and the National Guard.
Right Wing Watch relates how the topic came up:
Caller: If Obama’s going to be signing an executive order to take away our guns isn’t there something we can do to arrest this man? It’s a treasonous act. He’s swore an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States.
Pratt: Yeah, it’s called impeachment and that would be, along with defunding, the kinds of messages that need to go to Capitol Hill: When are you going to impeach this guy? When are you going to defund his illegal activities? Republicans can’t continue, at least I hope they cannot, continue to be spectators while the country is being torn apart.
Shrill and nonsensical would be the words best used to describe Pratt’s day of absurdities. But wanting Obama impeached for a crime he has not committed is just the tip of the iceberg for Pratt, who had yet to achieve full lunacy. That came when he said that gun-control laws are “pagan” and ”the most pagan of paganism.”
How are gun-control laws Pagan, you might be asking yourself. It’s simple, according to Pratt, who clearly doesn’t know the first thing about Paganism, either historical or modern:
Pratt: Frankly, it almost would seem that animism won’t go away. The left, which is largely made up of people who don’t believe in Jesus Christ’s blood as being necessary for our salvation, view inanimate objects as possessing their own will. That’s animism, that’s a return to the most pagan of paganism and look at what nutty political views it ends up supporting.
Okay, so let’s get this straight: a man who says we need a dead guy’s blood, and not just a dead guy’s blood but the blood of a guy who died and spent three days in a tomb before coming back to life, a guy who was not just a mortal man but also a god and more than that, a holy spirit, to save our souls thinks gun-control laws are nutty?
I am a Heathen. I know something about animism. Look, first of all, animism is a modern term dating from about 1720. Ancient Pagans had no term for the idea that inanimate objects have a spiritual essence. They did not think that these objects had wills of their own, that a gun, for example, would be able to shoot somebody without a human pulling the trigger, or that a rock would be able to hit a person without being thrown, or that water does leap up out of a pool and drown a person.
An animist respects those objects he feels possess a spirit, meaning that if Obama was truly an animist, he would respect guns, perhaps putting them on a par with humans. He might even leave a gun offerings.
This is clearly and demonstrably not the case. But Pratt thinks he is not the one being nutty.
Do these people ever think about what they’re saying? Sadly, no. They do not think about what they’re hearing either, or people like Pratt and Eliason would not have an audience.
Liberals and gun-control advocates do not view guns as having their own will. This is more of the NRA nonsense that guns don’t kill people, which is, I suppose, something you can believe until a slug turns your head into a canoe.
The simple fact of the matter is that a man with an 18th century pistol or musket is going to kill one person (at best, assuming the weapon does not misfire, a common problem) before he is mobbed and disarmed. A man carrying an AR-15 with an expanded drum can kill dozens, and there may not be anybody left to mob and disarm him before he reloads and does it again.
The Founding Fathers did not foresee the AR-15 or expanded drums (the Aurora shooter had a 100-round drum magazine). The guns the Founding Fathers envisioned were single-shot muzzle loaders that did not work well in the rain. The British “Brown Bess,” or “Land Pattern Musket” might fire three to four times in a minute if the gunman knew what he was doing, and the 18 mm ball might travel 50 to a hundred yards.
Here was how you loaded a Brown Bess:
- Tear cartridge with teeth and prime the pan directly from the cartridge;
- Stand the musket and pour the bulk of the powder down the barrel;
- Reverse the cartridge and use the ramrod to seat the ball and paper envelope onto the powder charge.
The procedure for the AR-15 is somewhat different: you slap a clip into it and pull the trigger. You can empty a 30-round clip in a couple of seconds and you can do so in the rain. A fully automatic AR-15 can fire 800 rounds per minute and they don’t go 50 to 150 yards; effective range for an AR-15 is from 400 to 600 yards. It’s true that these civilian models are not meant to be fired automatically, but even so, with an AR-15 you can fire as often as you can pull the trigger, which is many more times than three-to-four times a minute.
Even firing once per trigger pull, you can empty a half-dozen 30-round magazines in a few minutes’ time, a incredibly destructive rate of fire compared to that envisioned by the Founding Fathers when they voted on the Second Amendment.
One can readily see the difference between slaughtering a room full of theater-goers with an AR15 and trying to do the same thing with a musket.
But Pratt thinks gun-control laws are nutty.
Tell me you are going to see many mass murders by single shooters armed with muskets. And then convince me you are not nutty, Mr. Pratt.
But it is too late for that, as the rest of Pratt’s conversation demonstrates, with he and Eliason indulging in an all-too-familiar intellection circle-jerk:
Pratt: It’s the talk of a dictator, ‘I will do what I want, whatever seems right in my own eyes I’m going to do,’ and the idea that there’s any restraints imposed by the Constitution is simply not acceptable to the ruling crowd in Washington and they’re getting bolder because now they don’t have to stand for re-election. I believe, first of all, they understand they probably don’t have the votes in the Congress so why make their Democrat buddies go walk the plank and vote against the Second Amendment, they remember what happened in ’94 when that happened and I don’t think they want a repeat of that.
But what they may not understand is that people are watching. If there is an executive order issued in lieu of congressional action, which would be unconstitutional either way, then I’m hearing such resentment and anger and opposition that their simply going to lose any credibility the federal government might have had. It’s going to be a byword, it’s going to be a joke and people are not going to obey such an outrageous executive order.
Eliason: People would be marching in the streets.
Pratt: That would be the nicest thing that would happen.
Eliason: The frightening thing is this: if the President makes such an executive order and seeks to enforce it, is the military or who is there to enforce it if the order goes through?
Pratt: Then he has to ask how many of those police officers and soldiers would actually carry out such an obviously outrageous order. We had consequences rightly come to Lt. Calley for the slaughter of the people of the little village of My Lai and we hung Germans for following orders after World War II.
Perhaps Pratt and Eliason should buy homesteads in the Citadel (and take Pat Buchanan with them). They would no doubt be happier in the natural habitat of white supremacist, gun-fanatic survivalists who think they’re the last best hope for the Anglo-Saxon race.
What I want to know is, why the guys who claim they are exemplars of the Anglo-Saxon race, not only not look like Brad Pitt or Chris Hemsworth, but are inevitably mental rejects?
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
