I happened to catch Larry Pratt, the smarmy Executive Director of Gun Owners of America on “Hardball” yesterday and was reminded just how hollow most of the rhetoric coming from the gun lobby is.  More so than Wayne LaPierre, the “guns for everyone” spokesman for the National Rifle Association, Pratt exemplifies the “I want my guns because I want ‘em” mindset of some on the pro-firearms side.  He’s also, to my mind at least, creepy, slimy and condescending.  I feel like I need a shower every time I see him.  

There are few things that tick me off more than hearing someone make a completely bogus argument and then act like I’m a simpleton for not making the same faulty connections.  In his appearance yesterday, Pratt (well named if you ask me) was in rare form, never actually answering one question that was posed to him and getting hot under the collar when Chris Matthews tried to nail him down.  The only credit I can give him is that he – you’ll excuse the expression – stuck to his guns.

His main point, as always with the gun lobby, was that there’s no point in regulating guns because criminals will get them anyway so we would only be hurting law-abiding citizens.  No amount of rephrasing from Matthews would move him.  Yet he couldn’t answer the base question of why we have any laws at all when, by definition, the law-abiding citizens are the only ones who will observe them.  Why not do away with the whole legal system and trust everyone to abide by his own internal sense of values and behave as he chooses.  Think of the money we could save by eliminating the police departments and arming up ourselves.

What impressed me most – not in a good way – was that Pratt couldn’t tack when Matthews changed the question from “How do we keep criminals from getting guns?” to “How would I as a gun seller keep from selling to a criminal?”  Pratt’s response continued to be that one gun seller couldn’t keep a criminal from going elsewhere even when that was no longer what was being asked of him.  Matthews tried several times in different ways, but Pratt kept to his original line.  So let me put it again and more simply, Larry:  If I were a gun seller and didn’t want to sell a gun to a crazy, high, wife-beating felon, why shouldn’t I be able to make certain of that with a background check?

Pratt is one of the paranoiacs who fear a national gun registry – although that isn’t something being fought for.  And frankly I still don’t know why, when I can find out the name of the owner of any house in the country and I can’t buy a Mini Cooper without registering it, it’s government overreach to ask the same for lethal weapons, but that may just be me.  Then again neither do I get the mindset that allows for a black helicopter scenario in which the government takes away all of our freedoms or that any group of gun-toting yahoos could prevent it if it did.  If the government did go rogue, they would win.

But that wouldn’t happen.  Only in the addled brains of hotheads like Larry Pratt could that happen.  We are a democratic republic and if the past four years have proven anything it’s that the machinery of this government does nothing quickly.  Maybe these guys should join us in the real world.

The ironic thing is that there are some very good, logical and constitutional arguments for reasonable gun rights.  The trouble is Larry Pratt and Wayne LaPierre aren’t making any of them.  Instead they want us to turn our schools into war zones and arm everyone.  Certainly that would create a wonderful environment to grow up in.  (Hm, I guess that would be something of a boon to the gun industry, though, wouldn’t it?  But I’m sure there’s no correlation there.)

In his final moment of idiocy, Pratt countered the Quinnipiac poll that – like most others – said that 80% – 90% of Americans – even NRA members – favored comprehensive background checks.  “That poll is worth about as much as a $3 bill,” he said, then went on to say “you can make a poll say whatever you want it to say.”  Inexplicably he then referred to his own poll that stated the numbers were more like 5%.

Wait.  But he said polls can be made to say whatever you want them to say.  But he had a poll.  But his isn’t engineered to say what he wants?

I’m so confused.  And that’s what he wants.