Crackpot Larry Pratt
Let's get this out of the way: Larry Pratt, head of the so-called Gun Owners of America, is insane. He's a batshit crazy conspiracy theorist whose current claim to national fame is that he loves guns so very much more than you do, or than anyone else does, and whose group was formed because the National Rifle Association was just too darn moderate. Larry Pratt wondered aloud if the Aurora theater shooting
was a plot by the government and the United Nations. Larry Pratt's reaction to the Sandy Hook murder of elementary school children was to plant himself down in a discussion on whether or not Obama
was assembling a secret army of black people to confiscate guns and provoke patriots into committing violence which could then be used as pretense to round those gun owners into camps. Larry Pratt got himself canned 20 years ago by Pat Freaking Buchanan, because Larry Pratt's
ties to militia groups and white supremacists were too much for Savior of the White Race Pat Freaking Buchanan.
Why the hell that gets you prominent fetings by multiple Republican Senate candidates seems a question worthy of the sort of wall-to-wall coverage we normally reserve for missing airplanes. Why is the new crop of Republican Senate candidates so eager to be seen as endorsed by racist conspiracy theorists?
[W]hen Alaska Republican Joe Miller – the Tea Party candidate endorsed by Sarah Palin in 2010 – launched his second Senate campaign yesterday, he chose Gun Owners of America to help kick things off.
Miller’s launch event in Wasilla prominently featured a speech by Tim Macy, Gun Owners of America’s vice chairman, who the Alaska Dispatch reported “said his staff has been tracking Miller for years without his knowing it, in order to determine if he’s a true believer in gun rights and protecting the Second amendment.”
In an email in February, Miller proudly touted GOA’s endorsement. North Carolina Republican Greg Brannon also touted his GOA endorsement in a Senate debate last night.
Pratt and his group have had no dearth of national publicity—there's no way you can brag about their endorsement and not know that you are talking about the creepy white supremacist-tied conspiracy nutter who mainly gets on teevee to fill the Batshit Insane Person quota that all national news outlets take so seriously. But I'd really like to know—and by "really like to" I mean "probably don't want to"—what calculations are involved in actual Senate candidate Joe Miller or actual (no, really) Senate candidate Greg Brannon deciding that they need to prominently announce that they have been endorsed by the people who think a man walking into a Colorado theater and opening fire was probably sent there by the United Nations. Is this another one of those lowering-the-bar things? Will Republican Senate candidates next be going out to the Bundy ranch and threatening to shoot people attempting to enforce the laws Cliven Bundy doesn't like?
