247.3 - Clown Award: Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America

Clown Award: Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America

Now for one of our regular features, the Clown Award, given as always for meritorious stupidity - although stupidity has a somewhat different meaning this week.

So, this week the Big Red Nose goes to Larry Pratt, a representative of Gun Owners of America, a group which is if anything more fanatical about guns and mythical "gun owners' rights" than the Nutzoid Rabbit-brains of America is.

Back in 2013, an investigation by Mother Jones magazine found that hundreds of children in the US are killed every year by guns. Many are killed in homicides and many others in accidents, mostly when the children themselves, sometimes as young as 2 or 3, pull the trigger.

Since then, more data has shown such events to be even more widespread than thought. According to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, in 2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of - that is, by - young children and teenagers, with the most typical age of the child pulling the trigger being 3.

The New York Times reported on May 5 that during one week in April, four toddlers around the US killed themselves with guns, and a mother was fatally shot by her two-year-old while she was driving.

Gun nut Larry Pratt

Virtually all of these tragedies occurred because some grown-up, some I'm sure "responsible gun owner," left a gun unsecured. As a result, there have been increasing pushes for safety measures like trigger locks, gun safes, and even "smart-gun" technology, where a gun can only be fired by its intended operator. All, of course, are vigorously opposed by the gun nuts, who claim they threaten their sainted Second Amendment rights although it's damn hard to see how.

But that level of depravity isn't low enough for Larry Pratt. Asked about the yearly carnage among toddlers from guns, Pratt dismissed it as an issue, saying you can't base public policy on, quote, "occasional mishaps."

A 3-year-old child shooting themselves or a sibling, a 2-year-old killing their mother, shootings by or of children happening several times a week, and Larry Pratt, more concerned with how a trigger lock would interfere with his Wild West quick draw fantasies, dismisses them as "mishaps."

Y'know, there are different sorts of clowns, most of them funny, some of them a bit tragic, some of them, to some folks, even a bit creepy - but now we have the clown that make you nauseous.

Larry Pratt, nauseating clown.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/top-gun-lobbyist-calls-hundreds-child-gun-deaths-occasional-mishaps
http://everytown.org/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/us/guns-children-deaths.html