Gun Owners of America spokescritter Larry Pratt is a very far-right gun crackpot who rose to cable news prominence because the networks needed a pro-gun voice to come on their networks after the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the various mass shootings. Apparently, those networks did not particularly care whether the pro-gun voice they got was a Bundy-style extremist with ties to white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and a far-right militia movement that openly endorses the theory of armed revolution if the current or near-future government does something any particular one of those groups thinks is over the line.
So, naturally, here he is holding forth on exactly that. Cherish your pro-gun advocate, journalists and network bookers looking for easy quotes to balance out your latest mass murder stories. You own this guy.
Pratt was interviewing Robert Knight, a senior fellow at the American Civil Rights Union, who warned that “if a liberal Democrat is elected president, then there goes the Supreme Court, it could be two, three, four justices, and I think the Second Amendment would be in great peril if that happens.”
This is the same horseshit that militia-minded gun fetishists have been going on about during the entire time America's first black president was in office. The Pratt response is, at this point, rote: If the election doesn't go our way and the Supreme Court doesn't go our way, it might be murderin' time.
"[T]he courts do not have the last word on what the Constitution is. They decide particular cases, they don’t make law. Their decisions, unlike the Roe v. Wade usurpation, don’t extend to the whole of society, they’re not supposed to. And we may have to reassert that proper constitutional balance, and it may not be pretty. So, I’d much rather have an election where we solve this matter at the ballot box than have to resort to the bullet box."
Somewhere along the way a bunch of home-grown lunatics have convinced themselves that the Constitution of the United States enshrines a right to violently overthrow the government if individual citizens feel events warrant it. It doesn't, because duh, and while there have been sporadic attempts to test the theory all of them have ended the same way, with no remaining question afterward as to whether or not the surviving participants were still subject to American rule or not. Nonetheless, it's recently taken hold in the National Rifle Association and in the Pratt-led competitor GOA, and the respect and deference supposedly sensible journalists give to the premise has allowed it to spread like a cancer.
It's nonsense. This is a crackpot theory akin to Cliven Bundy's theories on cattle grazing or the armed, eventually deadly Oregon militia "takeover" of a federal wildlife refuge. Whether or not individual groups of fringe Americans have a "right" to murder federal officials or their other fellow Americans is not a legitimate entry into the national debate on gun violence. It should automatically disqualify the speaker from the conversation—again, because duh. Larry Pratt is not an advocate for lax gun laws, Larry Pratt is an advocate for the "justified" murder of federal officials. He's only pissed off about the gun laws to the extent that tightening the gun laws might make it harder for people like Larry Pratt—or even more unhinged versions of Larry Pratt—to act out on their convictions.
Stop interviewing him for your goddamn gun stories. Just stop. The grotesque deference with which the mainstream press treats Larry Pratt is the reason people like the Oregon militia nutcases believe they can stage armed takeovers of federal buildings and "the people" will rise up to finish the job.