Larry Pratt has been making the rounds criticizing any new laws aimed at addressing gun violence and today appeared on Crosstalk with Vic Eliason to argue that President Obama should be impeached if he signs any executive order regarding gun policy. But Pratt, the head of Gun Owners for America, didn’t say what an executive order would entail, and executive orders have been used by Presidents Bush (41) and Clinton in the past to prohibit the import of certain assault weapons. He told one caller that any executive order would be unconstitutional and merit impeachment.
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.
Pratt’s gun group has a decidedly Religious Right bent, and so it came as no surprise that he said any laws on gun safety actually represent “the most pagan of paganism” because it “view[s] inanimate objects” like guns “as possessing their own will.”
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.
Eliason and Pratt then went on to discuss discredited conspiracy theories about government purchases of firearms and ammunition, which Pratt said proves that “the administration seems to view the American people as the enemy.”
Eliason: We talk about the humongous amounts of cartridges and bullets that are being sent or I guess assigned to some of the federal agencies that you wonder, why in the world are they getting bullets? You know what I’m talking about.
Pratt: I sure do and I think that is another indication that the administration seems to view the American people as the enemy. They are buying anti-personnel rounds from what we can tell; they are not buying practice rounds.
Eliason: No, they’re hollow-point.
According to Pratt, Obama is a “dictator” and implied that any new gun laws will face violent resistance. He argued that law enforcement agencies shouldn’t “obey such an outrageous executive order,” warning that those who carry them out may end up like war criminal Lt. William Calley or the Germans executed “for following orders after World War II.”
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.
