Justin's Political Corner
Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt today tweeted a column from Erik Rush about the Trayvon Martin murder, which is about as insane as you’d expect any Erik Rush column to be. He claims that Martin was murdered because liberals turned him into a “thug-in-training” who “accosted” George Zimmerman.
Martin is “more a victim of his lifestyle than a victim of George Zimmerman,” Rush writes, calling him “someone increasingly invested in the unregenerate hedonism, conceit, belligerence, and rebellion of the thug culture.”
“Trayvon also came from a broken home, as does the overwhelming majority of black youth, thanks to liberal policies,” he continues, “This self-destructive lifestyle, which is vociferously defended by liberals, is proffered as a valid and almost sacrosanct reflection of ‘black culture.’”
He further linked affirmative action, welfare programs, the “propaganda of the left” and shows like “MTV’s Jersey Shore television program” to Martin’s murder: “This is the world of chaos and mediocrity to which Trayvon Martin aspired, and I maintain that it went just as far toward killing him as George Zimmerman’s pistol.”
Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt has been going-all out against immigration reform, warning that immigrants will “vote to take away our guns” and are “going to be probably just sitting around drawing welfare and voting Democrat.” He told radio host Steve Deace earlier this week that if a reform bill passes, “you can buh bye to your guns and buh bye to the rest of your freedom because this would be a country that had been californicated.”
In an action alert this week, GOA tells its members to call their senators and oppose immigration reform because if it passes “you could lose all your guns before 2035.”
“By 2035,” the alert warns, “the battle will no longer be about stopping the expansion of background checks. Most likely, it will be about stopping the government from coming to take your guns away.”
Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt is upset that just because President Obama “got 50-plus percent of the vote,” he thinks can now carry out his policy agenda. In one of his frequent interviews with conspiracy nut Alex Jones recently, Pratt alleged that the president is a “communist,” a “full-bore Marxist” and a “Mr. Dictator” who is “grabbing ahold of every bit of power and centralizing in his hands.”
Pratt also agreed with Jones that Democrats “had to steal the election” and urged supporters to take jobs as election monitors because “it’s either that or the republic.”
H/T: RWW
Gun Owners of America may soon join fellow conservatives in opposing comprehensive immigration reform, warning that a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants would lead to an increase in “anti-gun voters.”
Not only does the group oppose comprehensive legislation for clear partisan reasons, GOA spokesman Mike Hammond told the American Family Association’s news service the group may also work to defeat such bills if they include biometric identification or background checks for jobs.
h/t: Right Wing Watch
Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt spoke with Stan Solomon about the Boston marathon bombing, and they both agreed that the left is actually pleased with the attack because it might result in increased government control.
After co-host ‘Chief’ Steve Davis said that the left doesn’t want anyone who doesn’t work for the government to have guns and “they don’t care how many of us get killed, blown up, assaulted, murdered or whatever as long as they can control us by taking away our guns,” Solomon maintained that liberals are even okay with other liberals getting murdered: “It’s not just how many conservatives or Republicans [die] because these people that were killed and maimed and devastated and traumatized were overwhelmingly their people, they don’t care, they are like the Chinese who don’t care if they have a million casualties because they got a billion backups.”
In earlier interviews, Pratt and Solomon warned that President Obama is bent on launching a race war that will target upper-class white heterosexual Christians.
Spokesman for Gun Owners of America have already warned us that background checks on gun purchases may lead to anti-Christian persecution and genocide, and last week the group’s communications director Erich Pratt warned that new gun legislation might include a “government enemy list” that could target Gun Owners of America members or “anybody who attends church or listens to Christian radio.”
Of course, the Senate gun bill actually has language meant to prevent the creation of such any gun owners’ registry, but that didn’t stop Pratt from criticizing the legislation’s plan to expand background checks.
Pratt said that while he has no problem requiring background checks for things like nursery employees, he argued that there should be no background checks at all for gun purchases since it is a “God-given right.” Pratt went on to maintain that such background checks may lead to government screenings of pastors, writers or couples seeking to get married or having children.
“If anybody has ever seen the movie ‘Minority Report’ that is where we end up going, where government sets up a pre-crime unit,” Pratt concluded.
H/T: Right Wing Watch
A little known pro-gun lobby that’s well to the right of the National Rifle Association has complicated efforts to reach a solution on gun control legislation, top Democrats have said in recent days.
The Gun Owners of America has been around for decades, operating mostly in obscurity, dwarfed by the lobbying and fundraising prowess of the NRA. The group’s big gripe is that the NRA is too squishy and willing to compromise, and its recent efforts to scuttle gun control legislation appear to be scaring away Republicans amenable to background checks.
The results have frustrated Democrats trying to strike a bipartisan deal.
“The NRA — their lobbying efforts are being pushed even further to the extreme by virtue of the fact that there’s another organization called Gun Owners of America,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told Nevada Public Radio on Friday. “Whenever the NRA tries to be reasonable, the Gun Owners of America becomes more unreasonable, and it pushes the NRA [to the right].”
GOA is proud of its obstinacy against gun control. In a New York Times profile of the group last week, its executive director Larry Pratt took credit for scaring away Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) from discussions with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) about a bipartisan compromise on expanding background checks for gun purchases.
Less clear is the extent to which Gun Owners of America is the true foe of expanded background checks, rather than a scapegoat for Senate Democrats who are facing potentially tough reelection battles in red states and are skittish about supporting any significant new gun restrictions. For now, negotiations over background checks continue, as Democrats are now seeking to win over Sen. Pat Toomey’s (R-PA) support for a compromise deal.
Meanwhile, the Gun Owners of America is flexing its muscle in first major gun control effort in nearly two decades. Prominently featured on the front page of GOA’s website is a quote from Ron Paul calling the group “the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington.”
H/T: TPMDC
(via GOoA’s Pratt: ‘Angry Liberals Should Not Have Guns’ | Right Wing Watch)
Larry Pratt, the extremist and conspiratorial leader of Gun Owners of America, last week gave a speech to We the People Tea Party of Northwest Louisiana where he mused that liberals should not be allowed to own guns.
After saying that President Obama held a shotgun “girly like” while skeet shooting, the Shreveport Times reports that Pratt told the group that Democrats like Obama “almost got me convinced to modify my purist Second Amendment position: there are people that shouldn’t have guns, angry liberals should not have guns.”
While the White House, governors, Congress and other public officials grapple with policy responses to last month’s mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, many Americans wonder whether the massacre of young children will provide momentum for more effective laws that previous killing sprees – even one that gravely wounded a member of Congress – have not.
Some assume, wrongly, that nothing can be done. Politicians’ fear of the $200+ million National Rifle Association (NRA) is generally cited as the reason for weak gun laws that undermine law enforcement and put citizens at higher risk from gun crimes. The power of the NRA to determine the outcome of elections may well be more myth than reality, but even the perception of such power can give the group tremendous political muscle, along with its aggressive lobbying and strong-arm political tactics.
The NRA is not alone in attempting to prevent effective regulation of guns and promoting reckless policies that leave Americans vulnerable to crime. Its efforts are supported by the same kind of coalition that undermines the nation’s ability to solve a wide range of problems. Corporations, right-wing ideologues, and Religious Right leaders work together to misinform Americans, generate unfounded fears, and prevent passage of broadly supported solutions.
Understanding the extremism and dishonesty at the heart of right-wing obstructionism is crucial to overcoming it.
Who’s Extreme?
Opponents of stronger gun laws portray any effort to regulate the sale of even military-style weapons as radical assaults on American freedom. For instance, Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel, a Religious Right legal group, called President Obama a “slime ball,” claiming falsely that Obama used his remarks at a memorial service for the Connecticut shooting victims to push “radical” gun control and saying of Obama, “His extremism knows no lows.”
But it is Barber and NRA officials who are staking out an extreme position. They emphatically do not speak for the American people. More strikingly, the NRA leadership and its allies do not speak for the group’s own members. Huge majorities of NRA members support sensible policies that the group opposes. For example, 82 percent of the public, and 74 percent of NRA members, support requiring a criminal background check of anyone purchasing a gun. NRA leaders strongly oppose requiring background checks for gun sales. And a recent poll taken after the Newtown shooting found that a majority of people who live in gun-owning households support a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.
At the urging of NRA officials, Congress has even passed laws that undermine law enforcement officials’ ability to fight gun crimes, forcing the Justice Department to destroy within 24 hours records about the buyer in approved purchases and making it harder for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to track sales of certain guns used in crimes. How do anti-gun-regulation activists prevent action in the face of broad public support? They deploy a range of strategies and tactics that right-wing activists use on a variety of issues:
Denying and Masking Reality
On issues from gay rights to climate change, right-wing activists stick stubbornly to their ideology even when it is clearly controverted by scientific consensus and other reality. On gun violence, NRA officials and their allies refuse to acknowledge that the availability of assault weapons and high-volume ammunition clips, or the lack of background checks for private sales of guns, are problems that make it easier for a shooter to kill more innocent people quickly. They ignore evidence that stronger gun laws can and do reduce gun crimes. According to an October 2012 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, “When states expand firearm prohibitions to high-risk groups, and adopt comprehensive measures to prevent diversion of guns to prohibited persons, fewer guns are diverted to criminals, and there is less violence. ”
One way to mask reality is through rhetoric that distorts or hides the truth. Tea Party leaders and their allies rallied opposition to federal health care reform by portraying “ObamaCare” in lurid end-of-freedom, America-destroying rhetoric. They were successful in building public opposition to the generic “ObamaCare” – even though there was strong majority support for most of the substantive elements of the plan. By portraying advocates for stronger gun regulation as government thugs who want to take guns from hunters’ hands, NRA leaders and their allies have been able to generate some poll numbers indicating opposition to “gun control,” but the more relevant fact for policymakers is that huge majorities of Americans, and of NRA members themselves, back many of the most commonly discussed approaches to reducing gun violence. Stronger efforts to keep dangerous guns out of the hands of dangerous people are simply not attacks on the right recognized by the Supreme Court under the Second Amendment of law-abiding citizens to have guns for hunting or self-defense.
Shifting Blame
The speech by the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre a week after the Connecticut shootings was a memorable display of blame shifting. He attempted to cast blame for the killings on everyone but his own group’s resistance to stronger controls on assault weapons and the firearms or ammunition themselves.
Religious Right leaders and right-wing pundits played their usual parts in the spin. Religious broadcaster James Dobson said the shooting was God’s judgment for the country turning its back on scripture and on God. Franklin Graham said much the same: “This is what happens when a society turns its back on God.” Radio host Steve Deace blamed public schools for promoting a “culture of death” and teaching students “there is no God and thus no real purpose to their lives.” American Family Association spokesperson Bryan Fischer said God wasn’t there to protect students because schools were not starting the day with prayer. Newt Gingrich blamed “an anti-religious secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life,” along with video games. Culture warriors Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder wrote in Movieguide:
By removing God, the Bible, God’s Law, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit from society, including the mass media and the schools, we are raising generations of people with no faith in God or Jesus and, hence, no moral conscience, and no self-control. If so many people have no faith, no moral conscience and no self-control, then it’s no wonder our society is suffering from all these mass murders by evil lone gunmen.
Tea Party Nation blamed teachers’ unions, liberals, and an “over-bureaucratized society.” The Oathkeepers, a Tea Party offshoot for military and law enforcement officials, argued that the federal government was “complicit in the deaths of these children, and in fact an accessory to their mass murder, by forcibly disarming (with the very real threat of prison) all the teachers, all the staff, and any parent who may have been on school property.”
The consequence of such blame-spreading is that it creates distractions from addressing the real problems. One Religious Right leader appearing on American Family Radio called the shooting a “gracious” act of divine punishment designed to “bring us to our senses and bring us back to Him.”
Hostility to Compromise
The absolute refusal to compromise – indeed, the vilification of the very idea of compromise – is at the heart of the right-wing movement and much of the modern Republican Party. That has been the story of GOP obstructionism on tax policy, judicial nominations, and more. Just as the Tea Party and its corporate backers have gone out of their way to punish Republicans they see as insufficiently “conservative” – even when it meant nominating extremists who could not win a general election – leaders of the NRA and other groups like the Gun Owners of America react with fierce hostility to talk of compromise. Their political power comes largely from the fear they have created among elected leaders that the group will spend lavishly to punish even the tiniest dissent from its ideological dogma. The NRA’s leaders loudly pulled out of current conversations convened by the White House, denouncing the effort to find policy solutions to gun violence as “demonizing” the Second Amendment, and they launched a “Stand and Fight” campaign even before the details of the White House proposals had been announced. Rep. Steve Stockman from Texas even threatened to file articles of impeachment.
One way Religious Right leaders justify their opposition to compromise is claiming a biblical mandate for their favored policies, something Religious Right leaders do on issues like taxes as well as issues involving privacy and sexuality. Discredited Religious Right “historian” David Barton calls the Second Amendment “the biblical right of self-defense” and says it requires that individual Americans have access to any weapon the federal government has.
Smearing Opponents
Just as Religious Right groups smear political opponents as hostile to religious liberty, anti-gun-regulation groups smear as enemies of liberty anyone who advocates for stronger oversight on the purchase of weapons capable of mass violence. Even though polls show that NRA members believe support for the Second Amendment goes hand in hand with preventing gun crimes, the group’s leaders falsely equate any effort to strengthen gun laws to advance public safety with a desire to confiscate Americans’ handguns and hunting rifles.
Religious Right leaders are prone to make claims that only fellow believers are capable of moral action and decision making. Snyder and Baehr, in their post-shooting column, wrote, “Without God, without faith and values, we are just soulless meat machines who can kill without mercy.”
Promoting Conspiracy Theories
The right-wing base of the Republican Party is fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories about liberals and other perceived enemies. That’s why so many Republicans believe President Obama is a secret Muslim bent on the destruction of the US, or that he was not born in the United States. During the Obama administration, right-wing websites have circulated conspiracy theories about the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security administration stockpiling ammunition intended to be used against Americans and building concentration camps for conservatives.
National Rifle Association leaders claimed during the 2012 election that President Obama’s lack of action on gun issues during his first term was an elaborate ruse to mask his radical intentions to disarm gun owners. Larry Pratt of the Gun Owners of America insisted that the federal health care reform law was meant to “take away your guns.”
Some went even further: Christian radio host Bradlee Dean, a close ally of Rep. Michele Bachmann, suggested that the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, like earlier murders at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, were actually orchestrated by the government to create a pretext to ban guns.
Extremist Interpretations of the Constitution
A Wyoming legislator has introduced legislation that would make it a felony to enforce a federal ban on assault weapons or high-capacity ammunition. The idea that a state could imprison federal agents for enforcing a federal law may excite right-wing activists, but it doesn’t reflect a reality-based view of our constitutional system of government. And that’s a widespread problem. David Barton insists that the founding fathers’ view of the constitutional right to bear arms means that any weapon the government possesses must also be available to the population at large: “…whatever the government’s got, we’ve gotta have the same thing, because if they’ve got an AK-47 and come through and we’ve only got a BB gun on the inside, this is not a deterrent. So the whole purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure you have equal power with whatever comes against you illegally.” If Barton is really saying that citizens have a Second Amendment right to anything that is in the U.S. military arsenal – chemical weapons, fully automated machine guns, bombs, and more – that is emphatically not a view endorsed by the Supreme Court.
Ted Cruz, a new U.S. senator from Texas elected with major support from Tea Party activists said recently that efforts to restrict the sales of assault weapons and ammunition are unconstitutional. In fact, even the conservative Supreme Court has said clearly that regulating the sale of dangerous guns is not prohibited by the Second Amendment. According to Justice Antonin Scalia, “the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns.”
Harnessing Corporate Money
Right-wing causes, including the Tea Party, anti-unionism, and anti-environmentalism, have benefitted from a flood of corporate money in the wake of Supreme Court decisions gutting the nation’s campaign finance laws. In addition, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing group that acts as matchmaker between corporate interests and lawmakers eager to do their bidding, has produced literally hundreds of model bills that right-wing legislators have enacted into law – attacking unions and public education and otherwise supporting the predatory privatization of public assets and government services. Among the model bills ALEC has previously promoted is the so-called “stand your ground” law originally adopted in Florida. ALEC deemed it a national “model” law, and it was enacted in more than two dozen states. The Florida law was cited initially to prevent the prosecution of the man who killed Trayvon Martin.
Some analysts believe the NRA has morphed from a grassroots group teaching marksmanship to a trade association for gun manufacturers – a “lobbying, merchandising and marketing machine.” Business Week reported in January 2012 that more than 50 firearms-related companies had given at least $14.8 million to the group. The NRA has boosted gun makers several ways: its rhetoric about gun confiscation has spurred binge buying by gun enthusiasts; it has pushed a federal law that limits liability against gunmakers as well as state laws that bar cities from suing gun manufacturers (in conjunction with ALEC); and the NRA’s legislative arm has also “helped ensure the end of the federal assault weapons ban” in 2004 (which the NRA and ALEC opposed in 1994). Business Week quotes the former NRA President Sandy Froman claiming that it “saved the American gun industry from bankruptcy.”
Anything Goes
A hallmark of right-wing activism over the past four years has been a willingness to say and do anything to try to undermine the effectiveness of the Obama presidency and to try to prevent the president’s re-election (as well as his initial election). Rhetorically, that has meant equating health care reform and other initiatives with tyranny. In response to recent reports that some aspects of gun regulation could be strengthened by executive order, the right-wing Drudge Report posted photos of Hitler and Stalin.
Before the 2012 election, NRA leaders portrayed President Obama as conspiring to abolish Americans’ Second Amendment rights. But NRA efforts to bring down the Obama administration went well beyond political rhetoric and campaign spending. The NRA leadership played a significant role in the failed effort by congressional Republicans to turn the ATF’s botched “Fast and Furious” operation into an administration-destroying scandal. NRA officials even announced that the group would “score” a House vote on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, getting votes from Republicans and some Democrats eager to preserve a 100-percent NRA rating.
Money, Power, and Perception
Back in August, Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore said, “Democrats have decided, I think wrongly politically and morally, that it’s only an issue they can lose on.” Indeed, even though the group’s recent political spending is heavily weighted toward Republicans, the lack of desire to cross the NRA’s lobbyists and activists is bipartisan. In 2009, a Democratic Congress complied with demands for federal laws allowing people to bring guns onto Amtrak trains and into national parks; in 2010 the group demanded, and got, a special exemption from identifying its donors in the DISCLOSE Act under consideration.
Last week, we reported that Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America joined conservative talk show host Stan Solomon to warn about President Obama’s alleged plans to incite violence and bring about a race war against white Americans.
We found another interview between Pratt and Solomon from January, in which they went into even more detail about the looming race war and denounced new legislative efforts to prevent gun violence.
Pratt claimed that “some kind of social implosion” is inevitable during Obama’s second term, and that “it would be a wonderful surprise if it did not happen.”
Solomon specifically claimed that under President Obama we will witness attacks “on Christian, heterosexual white haves by black, Muslim and/or atheist — not that there’s much difference — black have-nots.”
He warned that “if you are a white person in this country, and this holds for all quality people of any color, but I’m saying specifically if you are a white, heterosexual, Christian, working, married person” and don’t own a gun, then “there is at least a substantial chance that you and/or some member of your family will be hurt and/or killed.”
Pratt agreed with Solomon’s dire prediction, saying the host wasn’t “stretching to say that.” He added that the “Alinskyites” who control the Obama administration think “this is the time” to “bring violence about.”
Later, Solomon mused that “the best thing that can happen to a liberal is to be mugged,” and wondered why Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) still supports gun control after she was mugged in 1995, to which Pratt replied: “Well, maybe she liked it.”
(via Gun Fools on Talk To Solomon Worry Obama Will Turn His Secret Black Army On Them)
It takes a special kind of imagination to think of things like these three conservative gun nuts did on the air last week.
First, there is Stan Solomon, conservative radio host and paranoiac, worrying over the private black army Barack Obama will raise to kill white folks with guns.
But Solomon wasn’t finished: “I believe they will put together a racial force to go against an opposite race resistance, basically a black force to go against a white resistance, and then they will claim anyone resisting the black force they are doing it because they are racist.”
They. Who is they, do you think? “They” is black people, armed to the teeth and commanded by President Obama.
And from there, it just spirals into some kind of dystopian middle-school fantasy, guided by wingnut and Twitter denizen Greg W. Howard, who first claims that race relations were “healing” before Obama was elected. Yes, sure they were. This is how well they were healing. Greg W. Howard, in his own words:
Howard agreed: “You may be right because he has been sowing the seeds of racial hatred; we were healing quite well as a nation on racial issues until Obama came along and now we have a lot of racial discord.”
After arguing that Obama is “not American” and not a natural born citizen, Howard maintained that Obama may begin “wiping out a few hundred people who own guns, pull a large scale Waco or a Ruby Ridge type incident” and have it “tinged it with racial overtones.” But just in case Obama goes through with his plans to “take down” the Internet, “people are setting up phone-trees all over the place” to stop Obama in his tracks.
Yes, that whole racial hatred thing was healing quite nicely until Howard and his ilk decided to attack the African-American president with accusations that he’s not really a citizen, right? See, that’s how their minds work. They’re the ones sowing all the hatred, setting up phone trees to make sure the black dude doesn’t kill their internet after he takes away all their guns, and yet it’s all President Obama’s fault.
Larry Pratt and his sidekick Howard make Wayne LaPierre seem almost sane. Almost. These are people who resent the president’s Secret Service protection, and why not? I’m amazed they haven’t likened that detail to the commanders of Obama’s Secret Black Army.
Dear NRA, GOoA, and other paranoid gun nut extremist-aligned interests, your guns will NOT be confiscated and the 2nd Amendment isn’t under attack at all.
Via someecards
Republicans and pro-gun advocates are outraged over President Obama’s 23 executive orders to curb gun violence in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Though executive orders have always been a standard element of the presidency, invocations of dictators like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Saddam Hussein are becoming commonplace in the right-wing blogosphere. In reality, Obama has issued fewer executive orders than any other American president in the last century. The executive orders signed today focus on strengthening background checks, making it easier for law enforcement to track guns used in crimes, and ending the freeze on gun research.
Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX)
Stockman plans to introduce articles of impeachment, calling Obama’s anti-gun violence efforts “an existential threat to this nation.”Rep. Trey Radel (R-FL)
Following Stockman’s lead is Florida Congressman Trey Radel, who said impeachment “should be on the table” and falsely claimed that Obama wants an executive order to “ban guns.”Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX)
Gohmert, a Tea Party favorite who recently claimed an assault weapons ban would have to include hammers, charged that the president’s action is “illegal” and grounds for impeachment. “The American Revolution was all about fighting such a monarchy — and that is not what the Constitution anticipates. It’s not something a Constitutional president would do,” Gohmert lamented.Former Attorney General Edwin Meese (R)
Edwin Meese, former Reagan Attorney General and current Heritage Foundation official, is also taking up the call for impeachment. In an interview with Newsmax, Meese claimed Obama may have “really tried to override the Constitution itself.” Congress, he said, would have to take action, “perhaps even to the point of impeachment.”Larry Pratt
The head of Gun Owners for America urged Republican lawmakers to stop being “spectators while the country is being torn apart” and impeach Obama. Pratt also attacked all gun safety laws as “the most pagan of paganism” because they assume guns and other “inanimate objects as possessing their own will.”
Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt went back on VCY America’s Crosstalk, where he last month insisted that the health care reform law was meant to “take away your guns,” to talk to host Jim Schneider about the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
Pratt agreed with a caller who said that drugs such as Prozac were leading people to kill and another caller wondered if drugs are “raising a bunch of Manchurian candidates.” A man purporting to be Lanza’s uncle had claimed that he was using an antipsychotic drug, Fanapt, but the “uncle” turned out to be an imposter.
Just as many other right-wing commentators blamed the Newtown massacre on the public school system, even though Lanza was homeschooled, Pratt suggested that corporal punishment, along with the arming of teachers, would ensure that schools aren’t “death traps for kids.”
After warning against government “confiscation” of firearms, Pratt floated debunkedconspiracy theories about the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security purchasing ammunition for nefarious reasons and maintained that all policing on the federal level is unconstitutional.
h/t: Right Wing Watch
US gun rights advocates have signed a White House petition calling for British CNN host Piers Morgan to be deported for allegedly attacking the Second Amendment rights of ordinary Americans.
The outspoken former British tabloid editor has launched something of a personal crusade for greater gun control measures in the wake of the December 14 massacre at Sandy Hook elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.
On Tuesday, Morgan held an especially contentious interview with executive director of Gun Owners of America Larry Pratt, appearing to become incensed and incredulous when Pratt suggested more, not fewer, weapons as the solution.
You’re an unbelievably stupid man, aren’t you?” Morgan said at one point during the heated debate. “You have absolutely no coherent argument. You don’t actually give a damn about the gun murder rate in America.”
Following the interview, a Texas journalist posted a petition on the White House website alleging Morgan “is engaged in a hostile attack against the US Constitution by targeting the Second Amendment.”
“We demand that Mr. Morgan be deported immediately for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens,” it says.
Many Americans believe in the literal interpretation of the Second Amendment, which enshrines the “right to bear arms” in the US constitution.
Morgan insists America can outlaw military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines without infringing on people’s constitutional rights and says he has no quarrel with the Second Amendment.
Two days after the petition calling for Morgan’s deportation was posted, it had already garnered more than 19,000 signatures, closing in quickly on the 25,000 required to get a response from the White House.
At least some Americans have come out in support of British citizen.
In one message, reposted by Morgan, Lee Cox in Arizona wrote: “I’m a native-born US citizen, and I agree 100% with Mr. Morgan. If he goes back to the UK, should I go with him?”
America has suffered an epidemic of gun violence over the last three decades including 62 mass shooting incidents since 1982. The vast majority of weapons used have been semi-automatic weapons obtained legally by the killers.
h/t: The Raw Story
