Larry Pratt's Remedy for School Shootings: More Spanking

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.”

Caller: These kids are on psychotropic drugs, mainly Prozac, which makes them homicidal or suicidal and a lot of the teachers who can’t handle these kids are recommending that they go in for psychiatric treatment and next thing you know they are on these drugs.

Pratt: The teachers aren’t allowed to spank them anymore, which didn’t have any long lasting effects other than, ‘I don’t want that to happen again so I’ll behave in the future.’ But the drugs, as you were getting to I think change their minds.

…

Caller: I also wanted to know on the coattails of the gentleman that mentioned Prozac: are we raising a bunch of Manchurian candidates?

Pratt: That’s a valid question. I guess there could be long-term damage done by these drugs that may not manifest themselves until sometime in the future because of who knows what stimulus that occurs. But it’s just a very dangerous thing to be playing with the makeup of people’s minds. It’s so avoidable, all we have do is admit that children need discipline, they respond well to it and then things are much more under control. We’ve lost control of our schools in so many places in the United States and it really could be addressed effectively and we refuse to. It’s almost equivalent to the refusal to talk about using drugs in self-defense and making it so teachers, principals and janitors could be armed at schools. ‘Everybody knows that guns and children don’t mix,’ well no, actually everybody doesn’t know that, and in fact that notion, as I have said before today, that notion is unhappily the big reason why schools are such death traps for kids.

After warning against government “confiscation” of firearms, Pratt floated debunked conspiracy 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.

Pratt: I think the more people invest in protecting themselves in this fashion, paying all this money for firearms to defend themselves, any call for confiscation such as came from the Governor of New York and I gather other politicians as well is going to be met with, shall we say, no respect.

Schneider: Perhaps on that issue there have been a number of stories that have come out recently that the US government is just buying up massive rounds of ammunition. One story indicated the Department of Homeland Security has purchased over a billion rounds of hollow point ammunition for domestic purposes, not for military purposes. Some stories have indicated that even the Social Security Administration has purchased 174,000 rounds of ammo. Is there any truth for this or is this some kind of hype that’s out of control?

Pratt: The reports continue and they are in the mainline press. When you read about the Social Security buying large quantities of ammunition, whatever for? Did somebody lose their check and they’re going to go shoot them up? What exactly is it that Social Security Administration needs a police force at all let alone buying that many rounds? Target practice I don’t think consumes that many and frankly they shouldn’t be having target practices, they shouldn’t have police forces at the federal level, those are not constitutional.