In the wake of the senseless shooting of three innocent people at a Ross Township Supervisors' meeting, the LV Tea Party has decided it's time that area lawmakers and the police community meet the fun lovin' gun nut community. In a move completely insensitive to the local victims of that shooting, they're bringing in perhaps the biggest gun nut in this country. Wayne LaPierre? Nah, nothing so tame as the NRA, especially someone whose name is so ... French. Instead, it's Gun Owners of America (GOA) founder Larry Pratt. He's the headliner for their October 11 meeting. They expect to pack the house.What's more, they are summoning all Lehigh Valley area PA lawmakers, Northampton County Council, Lehigh County Comm'rs, both Sheriffs, both DAs, and the Mayors and Police Chiefs of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton.
Pratt, incidentally, has been designated as a "false patriot" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Larry Pratt, a gun rights absolutist whose Gun Owners of America (GOA) has been described as "eight lanes to the right" of the National Rifle Association, may well be the person who brought the concept of citizen militias to the radical right.According to Rational Wiki, he's also the founder of English First (an English-only movement organization), U.S. Border Patrol (an anti-immigration group), and Committee to Protect the Family (an anti-abortion and anti-same-sex marriage organization).
In 1990, Pratt wrote a book, Armed People Victorious, based on his study of "citizen defense patrols" used in Guatemala and the Philippines against Communist rebels — patrols that came to be known as death squads for their murderous brutality.
Picturing these groups in rosy terms, Pratt advocated similar militias in the United States — an idea that finally caught on when he was invited for a meeting of 160 extremists, including many famous white supremacists, in 1992.
It was at that meeting, hosted in Colorado by white supremacist minister Pete Peters, that the contours of the militia movement were laid out.
Pratt, whose GOA has grown since its 1975 founding to some 150,000 members today, hit the headlines in a big way when his associations with Peters and other professional racists were revealed, convincing arch-conservative Pat Buchanan to eject him as a national co-chair of Buchanan's 1996 presidential campaign.
The same year, it emerged that Pratt was a contributing editor to a periodical of the anti-Semitic United Sovereigns of America, and that his GOA had donated money to a white supremacist attorney's group.
Pratt is today close to the extremist Constitution Party and its radical theology.
Denying he's a racist, Pratt claims he's a rock star. He recently worried that civil rights charges against George Zimmerman would just “intimidate the rest of the country so that we don’t think about defending ourselves” against “attacks by black mobs on white individuals.”
Don't know about you, but that sure sounds racist to me.
This disturbs me. I visited the Tea Party several times in the past and found that, though the members are perhaps whiter and older than the rest of the Lehigh Valley, they are basically decent people. Many of them were downright friendly. But bringing in a racist lunatic like Pratt, while inviting local leaders to see it, is evidence that they've become far too extreme.
My guess is that no Sheriff, DA, County legislator or Mayor will darken their door.
