Yesterday's New York Times contained a front-page article describing in great detail how the Gun Owners of America (GOA), led by Executive Director Larry Pratt, has had a tremendous effect by lobbying Congressional legislators to reject any new federal gun laws post-Sandy Hook.
The group has already been successful in both freezing senators, particularly Republicans, who have appeared to be on the fence about supporting bills to expand background checks and increase penalties for illegal gun purchases, and empowering those who have a strong gun rights background.
“They are strong defenders of the Second Amendment,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who received donations from the group during his primary campaign and is its key ally in the Senate.
The group is to the right of the NRA (and that's saying something), and some have "credited" them with getting the NRA to oppose universal background checks for all potential gun purchases, including those involving private sales, something they supported as recently as 1999.
Part of the group’s mission, Mr. Pratt said, is to stay on top of the N.R.A. “when we don’t think they’ve gone far enough.”
Pretty straight-forward stuff, right? A discussion of a group, what they believe, and their significant impact in recent weeks on an issue of national importance. A good piece of analysis that helps explain why progress on national gun legislation has stalled despite the overwhelming popularity of various elements. So, what's my problem with the article?
The problem is that the article ignores the paranoid, delusional racist demagoguery that Larry Pratt has employed publicly, as recently as February, to gin up his supporters' fears about why President Obama really wants to pass gun legislation. This race-based demagoguery is central to any discussion of the role Larry Pratt and GOA are playing in the current gun debate. It is absolutely stunning that the NYT article omitted it completely.
Larry Pratt has long been a racist, right-wing, militia-loving extremist. In 1996 he was forced out of his leadership position in Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign when the news broke that he had been an invited speaker at events put together by white supremacists and militia leaders. For even more detail on Pratt's extremism on this and related issues, see this post at Media Matters.
But maybe that's old news. Maybe. Fine. How about what Pratt said this year, 2013, on the matter of President Obama and gun control, the very issue on which the NYT article does focus? I wrote about this some last month. In an appearance on right-wing radio (the "Talk to Solomon" show) in late February, Pratt spoke about why he thinks the President is pushing for stricter gun control policies:
Pratt argued that President Obama is building his own private army and will send his agents "door to door" to "confiscate guns" -- all to provoke a "violent confrontation" with gun owners.
When the other right-wingers on the show went even further, stating that Obama's goal was specifically to provoke a race war, Pratt agreed that Obama "would definitely be capable of something as evil as you were suggesting."
Pratt envisions Obama as Nat Turner, Django Unchained, and a Black Panther all rolled into one.
A month earlier, on the same show, Pratt again engaged in racial demagoguery. Host Stan Solomon predicted that in President Obama's America:
“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.”
Am I crazy, or are statements like these by Pratt about guns, race wars, and President Obama relevant in the kind of article the NYT ran on yesterday's front page? To paraphrase Fox News, I'll let you decide.
PS-Please check out my new book Obama's America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity, published by Potomac Books, where I discuss Barack Obama's ideas on racial, ethnic, and national identity in detail, and contrast his inclusive vision to language coming from Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh and (some) others on the right. You can read a review by DailyKos's own Greg Dworkin here.