One of Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt’s favorite talking points is that “of the mass murders in the last 20 years, all but one have taken place in a gun free zone.” (That statistic is just plain wrong, but that’s another story). Speaking with a conservative radio host in Idaho this week, Pratt delved into the one shooting that he counts as an “exception” to this nonexistent trend: the 2011 shooting at Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ “Congress on your Corner” event at a mall in Tucson, which left six dead and Giffords critically injured. Giffords and the constituents who came to talk with her - including a nine-year-old-girl and a Republican-appointed federal judge — had it coming, Pratt implies, because “it was a Democrat town hall meeting of a Democrat representative” and Democrats “don’t necessarily, most of them, believe in carrying guns.”…. “And so when this dirtbag attacked a town hall meeting,” Pratt continues, “he didn’t find any resistance and he was able to kill a number of people there.”
Just when I manage to convince myself that there’s NO POSSIBLE WAY that gun nuts could POSSIBLY find a way to be anymore offensive, mean-spirited, and dismissive of those who’ve lost loved ones to gun violence, I learn all over again that this is a barrel with no bottom. So many gun nuts believe that their gun “rights” trump any and all considerations- even human life. That so many gun nuts are also arch-Conservatives who oppose abortion (where the claim to be “pro-life”) under any circumstances is laughable. That these trolls lack the self-awareness to recognize that contradiction is indicative of just how dangerously inhuman they can be.
Larry Pratt is merely the latest (and most egregious) example of what verbal vomit can spew forth when a gun nuts puts their mouth in gear before engaging their brain and sense of humanity. Or perhaps they really DON’T care about the suffering of others. Perhaps Pratt and those who think like him really DO consider the massacre of innocent civilians to be merely the cost of freedom and not a problem…as long as someone else is burying their loved ones.
It’s difficult to believe that a human being could so thoroughly inhuman and insensitive to the pain and suffering of others. And to assert that they died because they were Democrats is…well, I’m not certain I could find a word in my vocabulary to adequately express my revulsion. I’m sickened by the thought that anyone would seriously consider their gun “rights” to be sacrosanct, inviolable, and of greater value than innocent human lives. OR that an “improper” political orientation could be blamed for the death of an innocent civilian. I don’t know Larry Pratt (and with any luck I never will), but his public persona leaves little doubt that he’s a miserable excuse for humanity, if for no other reason than he seems completely devoid of anything resembling said humanity.
We have no hope of having a rational discussion about the place of guns in American society as long as wingnuts like Pratt represent a point of viw that says “no compromise anywhere on anything, not one iota of change.” With Congress in the pocket of the NRA, gun nuts like Pratt are secure in the knowledge that political power (if not public opinion) is safely paid for and on their side.
The truly sad and ironic aspect of this saga is that the headquarters of Gun Owners of America is in Newtown, CT. Ponder that irony for a moment….
I can only hope there’s a reserved parking space in Hell with Larry Pratt’s name on it.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
