I’m feel­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly good about my work on Pratt, because it turns out GOA has also giv­en to a can­di­date my par­ents are fight­ing in New Jer­sey. If you want to help take the House away from Tom Delay, give to Anne Wolfe in the form at the right. Scott Gar­rett sucks, and he takes mon­ey from peo­ple who real­ly suck. I’m going to wrap up some of the Pratt research and bone up on John Tan­ton and some immi­gra­tion extrem­ists. I feel like I under­stand where that all con­nects to Pratt-style extrem­ism, but I’m not sure. Any­way, I want to con­clude with some sto­ries about Prat­t’s oth­er can­di­dates over the years. From the same PDF source I quot­ed in my last post:

Pratt can­not be writ­ten off as a fringe extrem­ist. He is a prac­ticed politi­cian who reg­u­lar­ly lob­bies Con­gress against gun con­trol. The Capi­tol Hill news­pa­per, ROLL CALL, called him “almost a shad­ow con­gress­man.” The Gun Own­ers of Amer­i­ca Inc. Polit­i­cal Vic­to­ry Fund con­tributed to 46 GOP House and Sen­ate cam­paigns in 1994. Ide­o­logues of the far-right such as Pratt have nev­er been far beneath the sur­face of the mil­i­tant wing of the anti-choice move­ment. In 1990, when Ran­dall Ter­ry took Oper­a­tion Res­cue “under­ground” to avoid pay­ing court-ordered judg­ments, Pratt came to his aid. The cri­sis began when fed­er­al agents seized O.R.‘s bank accounts in Decem­ber 1989. 0.R vio­lat­ed an injunc­tion not to block New York City clin­ics, then refused to pay a $50,000 tine. One of Terry’s aides met Lar­ry Pratt at a “res­cue” move­ment meet­ing and asked for his assis­tance. Pratt’s Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect the Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion raised near­ly $150,000 to pay O.R.‘s bills, with­out O.R. ever hold­ing the money.

One infa­mous can­di­date was Steve Stock­man. He had been unable to hold a job before win­ning a House seat from Texas as part of the 1994 Repub­li­can Rev­o­lu­tion. In office, Stock­man did­n’t accom­plish much, but he sure was involved in gun rights fights. (Inci­den­tal­ly, he was a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, blogged last time.) Pratt sent out an alert to GOA claim­ing Stock­man was going to remove the Assault Weapons Ban from a crime bill. Accord­ing to this arti­cle from Roll Call (the source of the “shad­ow Con­gress­man quote above):

The Gun Own­ers let­ter was sent with­out Stock­man’s approval, for­mer aides said. It backed him into a cor­ner. The issue was resolved when Armey called Stock­man and Pratt to his office to explain that he would not endan­ger the con­tract by bring­ing up such con­tro­ver­sial leg­is­la­tion. Accord­ing to sources who were in the meet­ing, Pratt–not Stockman–did most of the talk­ing. Stock­man said last week he did not recall the meet­ing and denied that Pratt was behind his attempt to force an ear­ly vote to repeal the ban.

Lat­er, Pratt got Stock­man to write Attor­ney Gen­er­al Reno, warn­ing her off of inves­ti­ga­tions into mili­tia groups. This was based on a tip from Sol­dier of For­tune mag­a­zine and the NRA. 

Touch­ing briefly on the theme of Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion and theoc­ra­cy that moti­vates Pratt, there are these oth­er choice quotes from the article:

Pratt assert­ed that gun rights are ”not a polit­i­cal issue. This is some­thing that comes first and fore­most from Scrip­ture. What I see in Scrip­ture is not that we have a right to keep and bear arms, but that we have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to do so.“ … Pratt quot­ed Exo­dus: ”If the thief is found break­ing in, and he is struck so that he dies, there shall be no guilt for his blood­shed.“ It is immoral to fail to defend one­self, since man is made in the image of God, Pratt argued.