gun violence

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.”

You Could Lose all your Guns before 2035 under the Amnesty Bill before the Senate

Contact your Senators and urge them to vote against the anti-gun immigration amnesty bill.

We’ve written you before about the immigration amnesty bill that will be debated on the Senate floor beginning June 10.

We had just been through a hard fight to stop gun bans and registration.  And some of you may have even felt the immigration amnesty was not a “gun” issue.

But if the amnesty bill is passed, within 20 years, Washington could be as anti-gun as Albany, Hartford, and Sacramento.

This is because the bill will create at least 11,500,000 new citizens -- but probably closer to 20,000,000 -- and, if history is any guide, they will vote 71% of the time for far Left Democrats like Barack Obama.

…

By 2035, 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. And there is nothing we will be able to do about it.

Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt spoke May 11 at a rally in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, in support of an unconstitutional measure that would nullify federal gun laws in the state – a favorite cause of extremist gun activists.

In his off-the-cuff remarks, Pratt diverged from his primary topic of opposing any and all gun laws to discuss immigration reform. Gun activists should be interested in blocking immigration reform, Pratt said, because, “If you bring in a whole bunch of Democrats into the country, most of them are going to vote to take away our guns.”

I know it’s not a, per se, a gun issue, but it’s a freedom issue. We began to see that if we were able to beat the president on this flagship issue of his, gun control, then the rest of his agenda was likely to falter. And you know what? That’s exactly what’s happening. Even the immigration bill, which tactically I think they should have led with, that might have passed if that had been first, I don’t think it’s going to pass now. It’s probably not going to get out of the Senate because it might be that we can filibuster.

Why do we care about an immigration bill? Well, frankly, it’s a matter of numbers. If you bring in a whole bunch of Democrats into the country, most of them are going to vote to take away our guns. And in a few years, that’s exactly what would happen. So, we don’t want the other problems that come with that, but just from a Second Amendment point of view, we have a dog in that fight and it’s important that we keep that bill down.

Pratt added that he is hopeful “that we’ve got an agenda that’s set to take off” thanks to his primary allies in Congress: Rep. Steve “If Babies Had Guns” Stockman and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Of Cruz, Pratt said, “I’m so happy that we made a major effort to support his campaign when he was a candidate.” Gun Owners of America contributed over $9,000 to Cruz’s primary campaign and Cruz touted the group’s endorsement.

“He has not disappointed us and I’m certain that he’s not going to disappoint us,” Pratt added.

Pratt’s confidence in Cruz is apparently well-founded: according to The New York Times, Cruz is Gun Owners of America’s “key ally in the Senate.”

That Pratt is “certain” of a U.S. senator’s loyalty is troubling, to say the least. After all, he is an avid conspiracy theorist who thinks the Aurora movie theater shooting might have been an inside job, warns that President Obama is building a private army to overpower the U.S. military, claims that liberals were happy about the Boston Marathon bombings, thinks that President Obama is a “Marxist” who stole the 2012 election and thinks it’s “not stretching” to say that the president is instigating a race war between white Christians and black Muslims.

So I think we’ve got an agenda that’s set to take off. We’ve got them down and if we keep the pressure on offense, thankfully we’ve got people like Rep. Stockman and Sen. Cruz in the Senate, we’ve got people that will fight. And because of that, we’re going to see a lot of action during the rest of the year, and especially in the Senate, where the rules are more favorable to what we’re trying to do. And Sen. Cruz has shown that he may have only been there for four months, but he knows how to run circles around just about everybody else in that Senate. We’ve got a real hero there that’s ridden into town from Texas. And I’m so happy that we made a major effort to support his campaign when he was a candidate, and he has not disappointed us and I’m certain that he’s not going to disappoint us. This guy is the real deal.

Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt has been widely credited with helping to bring down the Senate background checks bill last month, thanks in part to his cozy relationship with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and his sway among Cruz’s colleagues.

Pratt is also a radical anti-government conspiracy theorist who routinely compares President Obama to King George III and entertains conspiracy theories about the president provoking a race war and setting the police on Christian conservatives.

In an interview with conspiracy theorist Pete Santilli earlier this month, Pratt went even further than usual, detailing what he sees as a plan by the president to turn the Department of Homeland Security into a private  army “equally as powerful as the military” -- that is, if the president “can’t actually commandeer the military” first.

A lite version of this DHS conspiracy theory, which holds that the agency is hoarding ammunition in order to keep it away from gun owners, has inspired an actual bill in Congress.

Santilli: Now, Mr. Pratt, here’s my most important discussion that I’d like to have with you, and my most important concern just observing the Department of Homeland Security and the amount of ammunition and guns and the way they’re staffing up. Do you think that that DHS is a fighting force built by Barack Obama’s administration to potentially be used by the American people, even in opposition to a military that choose to be constitutional? Is that one of your greatest fears?

Pratt: During his ’08 campaign, the president had talked about setting up some kind of, what do you call it, a national security force, something of that sort that would be equally as powerful as the military. Well, that should have told us what he was up to. If he can’t actually commandeer the military, then he’ll bulk up the Department of Homeland Insecurity and he’ll have them buy a gazillion bullets. At the time they bought 100 million for this year, they already had 250 million, give or take, on hand. What is that all about? And these are anti-personnel rounds. These are not target practice rounds. They’re not semiwadcutters, they’re not even the military ball ammo, they’re anti-personnel.

Santilli: And that would be billions, not millions, right?

Pratt: It’s 100 million a year for the next ten years, well over a billion, which will then be five times, give or take, what they already have on hand. If nothing else, it would seem to be a strategy designed to drive up the price and lower the availability of ammunition in particular, firearms in general, but ammunition in particular.
 

Gun Owners of America has been enjoying its moment in the media spotlight recently, placing spokespeople  on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, drawing attention for its Capitol Hill lobbying efforts, and even being cited in official Senate Republican talking points about a filibustered judicial nominee.

It’s important to keep noting, then, that Gun Owners for America is an unhinged, conspiracy-theory promoting, extremist fringe group.

Adding to the evidence this week was GOA’s legislative counsel Michael Hammond, who joined VCY America’s Jim Schneider on Crosstalk radio Wednesday in order to share his theories that universal background check legislation might well lead to government-led genocide; that gun control advocates “bear some responsibility” for the Sandy Hook shooting; and that liberals have become “paranoic” and “racist against people who hold traditional American values.”

Schneider kicked things off by reading an email he’d been cc’d on explaining how universal background checks would lead us down a slippery slope to “confiscation” and “tyrannization.” Hammond wholeheartedly agreed, adding that there is a “real danger” that those would in turn lead to “extermination” and “genocide” not unlike in Nazi Germany:

Schneider: Let’s talk about this universal background check. Someone was drafting a letter to the president and they copied me in on the email, and here’s what  they said, and I’d like to get your reaction to it. They said that the consequence of a background check can be reduced to a simple formula: Examination (universal background checks) leads to registration (local, state and federal databases), which leads to investigation (bureaucratic decisions regarding fitness or need to bear arms), and that leads to confiscation, which leads to tyrannization (the oppression and genocide against a subgroup, whether by its ethnicity, religion, political views or status or against the entirety of a state citizen). So they use examination, goes to registration to investigation, confiscation, and tyrannization or…

Hammond: Which leads to extermination. And I was actively involved in rebuilding the Polish Solidarity Trade Union, which ultimately overthrew communism in the Eastern Bloc, and I can say that both when I talked to these people, they said, you know, ‘The Soviets have all these tanks stationed in our country and we have nothing.’ And let me say that 40 years before in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Nazis, who the first thing they did when they came into power was ban firearms, they exterminated the Jews in Warsaw and they did so because the government was the only one who was armed. And, if you watch documentaries of that period, the people facing mass slaughter and saying, ‘We just, what do we do? We have no firearms.” And so ultimately, registration, confiscation, tyrannization has the real danger of leading to extermination.

Schneider: So you wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that progression that this writer was talking about.

Hammond: No. I think there’s a danger that you go in that direction. There’s certainly been governments in our lifetime that have engaged in genocide on a very significant scale. And I have been on the radio in a lot of them, in places like Holland, in places like Poland, in places like the old Soviet Union, and I say to these people, ‘If, in America, we ever reach the point in which you were during our lifetimes, we would like to think that we would be able to defend ourselves.’

Later, discussing the Sandy Hook school shooting, Hammond said that Connecticut gun control advocates “bear some responsibility for what happened in Newtown” because they prevented teachers from carrying guns:

Hammond: Connecticut, as you probably know, had among the most stiffest gun control in the world prior to the shooting at Newtown, and as a result of politicians like Chris Murphy and Sen. Blumenthal and the other little Democrat politicians in that state. And all the gun control they had didn’t stop Newtown. As a matter of fact, what it said to Adam Lanza is, ‘You can kill all these kids, you can get your fifteen minutes of fame, you don’t have to worry that we’re going to allow any principles, staff or teachers to shoot back at you.’ These people in some respects, I think, horrifically bear some responsibility for what happened in Newtown.

Finally, Hammond reminisced about going to school during the Vietnam War and seeing “fourteen year-old kids walking up and down the hall with semi-automatic rifles.”

“Exactly what has happened to our country that we have become so paranoic, that we have become so gun-hating, in cases of the liberal media, and that the liberal media has become so almost racist against people who hold traditional American values?” he asked.

Hammond: When I was a kid, and there are very few advantages in life to being very, very, very old, but one, it means you have a little perspective. When I was kid during the Vietnam War, in high school, fourteen to seventeen year-old kids ended up walking back and forth across the campus, across the playground, up and down the halls, up and down the sidewalks of my ghetto school – it wasn’t a rural or suburban school, it was a ghetto school – with M1 semi-automatic firearms, fully functional, except they didn’t have a firing pin but you couldn’t tell that to look at them. Fourteen year-old kids walking up and down the hall with semi-automatic rifles, no one, no one thought that we were going to shoot up the school.

I graduated in 1967. 1968 they passed the first big gun control law, the Gun Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 [sic]. Now look, we’ve gone 40 years and we’ve reached the point in which holding up a Pop-Tart is considered threatening. Exactly what has happened to our country that we have become so paranoic, that we have become so gun-hating, in cases of the liberal media, and that the liberal media has become so almost racist against people who hold traditional American values?