In a recent interview, Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt responded to demonstrations and riots in Baltimore by insisting that they would not have been a problem if police and armed citizens had simply shot rioters dead.
“This should be a wakeup call, if one were still needed, for Americans to arm themselves and be vigilant and, frankly, to know who your neighbors are,” Pratt said on the “Liberty Roundtable” last week, “and if, God forbid, something like Baltimore were to loom as a possibility where you live, that you and your neighbors would be able to hopefully head it off before it gets as bad as Baltimore got. Because one thing I’m pretty sure of is if the bad boys see that this is not going to be taking candy from a baby, that you break a window, you get shot. ‘Oops!’”
When the program’s host, Sam Bushman, suggested that “Eric Holder or the next attorney general or Barack Obama or somebody else from above” was “calling the shots” during the riots in Baltimore, Pratt responded that that was “a reasonable supposition” although Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was probably just acting like a “hardcore liberal.”
Rawlings-Blake, Pratt said, should have simply demanded that “the first time one of the demonstrators looked cross-eyed, they got arrested, and then if they had broken a window, shot.”
“Then, it seems to me, we wouldn’t even still know where Baltimore is,” he said.
Later in the interview Pratt repeated his belief that “we need to deal more firmly with those that would try to create the sort of disorder.”
“So at the first instance of collective criminal activity, ‘Boom!’ In comes the paddy wagon, off they go,” he said. “And if they start violating persons or destroying property, ‘Bang!’ Then you don’t need a paddy wagon. “
