Halfway through President Obama’s second term, gun lobbyists are still not backing down from their wild and incendiary claims that the president will launch a crackdown against gun owners any day now. While theses remarks may not be rooted in reality, they have managed to stir up fear, helping boost sales for the groups’ allies in the gun industry.
One of the primary drivers of this paranoia is Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, who was interviewed alongside pundit Rick Ungar on Newsmax today.
Pratt told Ungar and host J.D. Hayworth, a former Republican congressman, that Obama is waging an attack against gun rights because “he clearly doesn’t like the fact that the American people can own guns because we might just want to use them to keep people like him from becoming tyrants.”
Ungar pointed out the obvious: “And in six years he’s yet to come and get your guns. It’s going to be right up to the wire, right Larry?”
Later, Ungar called out Pratt for spending the interview making completely baseless claims about the Obama administration’s policies on gun issues: “This is so overstated. We’ve had six years of this. Guess what, if Obama wanted to get your guns, the time to do it would’ve been after the shootings in Connecticut, and you know what, he didn’t do it. Get over it. I know you want gun sales to go up, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, I really do, but come on, let’s stop BS-ing the American public.”
