Right-wing cable channel Newsmax hosted a gun lobbyist on Thursday morning to not only rail against gun-safety measures in the wake of the horrific Uvalde school massacre, but to also specifically blame gun control for the mass shooting that left 19 children dead.
With Democrats, gun-safety advocates, and the vast majority of Americans now pushing for reform measures in the wake of this latest school shooting, conservatives have scrambled to come up with alternative solutions—no matter how bonkers—that never seem to include tightening gun laws. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other Republicans, for instance, have actually floated door control to stop mass shootings.
Appearing Thursday morning on Newsmax’s National Report, Gun Owners of America senior vice president Erich Pratt called it “absolutely disgusting” for President Joe Biden and other Democrats to be “pushing for gun control” and “raising money off dead children to advance their cause.”
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What Pratt left out is that his organization, which hypes itself as the “only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington,” is calling on its members to “take action” because the “anti-gun left is using TX tragedy to cower pro-gun Republicans.”
Pratt, who recently railed against “elected politicians” using the Buffalo supermarket shooting “to attack the rights of law-abiding citizens,” then insisted that increased gun-safety laws are actually responsible for shootings in Chicago and elsewhere.
“More than 40 people have been shot and killed in Chicago this month, but they’re not raising money on that because Chicago has very strict gun control,” he huffed. “All the gun control proposals that they're putting out, Chicago has adopted them. So it doesn't serve their cause to raise money on what's going on in Chicago.”
Furthermore, he pointed to mass casualty events that involved cars and trucks, such as the Waukesha Christmas parade or the 2016 Nice attack, asserting that a “killer can use any instrument to incur a mass killing” and that it would be “shortsighted” to ban guns because it won’t “stop an evil determined heart from killing.”
The longtime gun lobbyist then specifically targeted existing gun laws in Texas as the reason why a teenage gunman, armed with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, was able to mow down an entire classroom of children.
Instead, according to Pratt, a gun lobbyist, the solution is more guns.
“The left is calling for gun control, and yet it’s gun control that has contributed to this mass shooting that we saw in Texas,” he declared. “Eighty-one percent of police agree that teachers and staff should be armed. And with good reason, because no school in this country has ever had a mass shooting where there were armed teachers and staff. But tragically, that was not the case at this Texas school.”
Additionally, he called for fewer “gun-free zones,” insisting that killers choose these targets because they “don't want bullets being fired back at them” and they “love gun control,” adding that gun control is “what enabled this killer in Texas.”
Newsmax host Emma Rechenberg provided almost no pushback to Pratt throughout the seven-minute interview. At one point, she did wonder if there was “any sort of limitation” on gun and ammo purchases that he could envision.
“You will never stop evil determined people from getting their hands on dangerous instruments, whether they are cars, whether they are trucks, whether they are box cutters, which were used to kill three thousand people by hijacking planes on 9/11,” he responded. “You won’t stop that.”
Rechenberg agreed with Pratt in the end, even repeating his previous talking point drawing a causal relationship between gun violence in large cities and those cities’ “extremely strict gun laws.”
Meanwhile, at this weekend’s annual National Rifle Association convention in Texas, all firearms will be banned when former President Donald Trump delivers his speech.
