Erich Pratt (courtesy youtube.com)

Erich Pratt has been with the Gun Owners of America for the last 27 years. So he knows a thing or two about the gun “debate.” As CNN’s British-born Richard Quest discovered when he locked metaphorical horns with the GOA’s Executive Director (video below). Given the pressure of live TV, you really couldn’t have asked for a better defense of the Second Amendment than the one presented here.

For this interview, and the decades of service Mr. Pratt has devoted to firearms freedom, TTAG names Erich Pratt our Gun Hero of the Day. The People of the Gun and Mr. Pratt’s wife and eleven children should all be proud.

https://youtu.be/t5c9dniXQJA

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

30 COMMENTS

    • That would be EPIC. For now I’m done with the NRA.
      Wayne and Chris can take their seven figure incomes and wipe their backsides.

  2. Well Done. I don’t think his last big statement on restrictions was up to the level where he started, but he did have the other guy on his heels most of the time.

    The comment section really sucks.

    • Yeah, he dominated that guy.

      I wish he hadn’t gone to the constitution at the beginning and end… as near and dear as it is to us, I know from painful experience that 2A and the “god given” rights argument just doesn’t play in Peoria. When he equated 2A to 1A he was very strong.

      Also, it bugs me when pro gun guys refer to gun restrictions as “strict” instead of “heavily infringing”. IMO “strict” is for how parents treat their children. I realize that’d be yet another example of an argument that probably wouldn’t play with the average joe, but still.

    • That was just beautiful.
      Only one gripe – and it’s one we ALL need to practice at and make a reflexive habit: The Second Amendment debate is one of our Civil Rights and we need to throw that back in their faces, EVERY, TIME.
      Those who want “common sense gun control” are not demanding control of the guns – they are demanding control of Gun OWNERS.
      Say it with me: “I oppose Gun Owner Control laws.”

  3. Good lord…that CNN Quest guy is one super strange duck, which is saying a lot since this is CNN. I applaud Pratt for keeping a straight face while trying to have a discussion with him.

    • Strange Duck? More like pompous a$$.

      CNN must be getting the real rejects that couldn’t hack it in the UK. Talk about a verbal beat down – he got pummeled.

  4. Whatever you guys changed on the site, it now loads much faster on my phone. Keep up the good work.

  6. Holy Sh_t, we got done ‘splaining to the brits nearly 250 years ago, we got done ‘splaining to CNN before satan sh_t them out.

    Why doesn’t anyone standing up for the 2nd Amendment (in public) ever point back to the Declaration of Independence? You can amend the Constitution [by legal means] IF YOU’RE ALLOWED TO. If not, or if the prospect of that is in jeopardy, you effect the change you see fit, under the Declaration of Independence, Paragraph 2 specifically, with whatever means you can muster (up to, and including, beseeching Divine Wrath, but clearly all earthly means).

    Again, and still, KEEP YOUR GUNS FOR THE END OF AMERICA.
    KEEP YOUR GUNS, YOU HAVE ENEMIES ON ALL SIDES
    KEEP YOUR GUNS
    KEEP YOUR GUNS
    KEEP YOUR GUNS

    Oh, and support your local lead farmer, buy your ammo locally.
    LAUS DEO !

  7. God Bless Mr. Pratt. He ripped that shallow sophist a new a**hole. My heretofore low opinion of the GOA has been positively changed by this.

  8. For starters, gun-grabbers — the right and proper term for “gun control” and “gun safety” advocates — are not even the least bit interested in any kind of debate at all. Much less a measured one. Just about all that is ever seen on any of the major networks is a full-blown, one-sided shot-down with gun-grabbers getting to run rough shod over the civil rights activists arguing against a racist policy position like gun control and the so-called “moderator” or “host” doing absolutely nothing to coral their favored talking-head. This leads to the person simply trying to get a word in edgewise getting to say less than nothing, and then be accused of and called all sorts of vile things by people that are themselves actually guilty of the same merely by their stance on the issue.

    You can see and hear Mr. Quest practically chomping at the bit to respond to Mr. Pratt. Then, he opens up his reply with a blatant lie wrapped in an intentional misdirection. Our closest neighbor, Canada, has a homicide rate of 1.68, vs. 4.5 in the U.S, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. That’s about 2.7 times higher, not “10” or “25” or whatever other ludicrous number that Mr. Quest could care to throw out. Even this is down — way down — from 1991 when the per-capita murder rate in the U.S. was over 9. This is seemingly in spite of the fact that the (rather conservative) estimated private stock of guns went up dramatically in the intervening decades. This is especially egregious because there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever — empirical or otherwise — that suggests guns are causal or even correlational to violence. The simple and undeniable inverse correlation between gun ownership and crime rates in the U.S. completely and automatically refutes on its face any so-called “study” telling us that there are any such links. Nevermind the inconvenient fact that these “studies” do not (more likely cannot) account for tangible and intangible confounders such as: culture, history, philosophy, demography, immigration, socioeconomic stratification, “education” and “justice” systems (such as they are anyway), differing definitions for the same crimes, differing ways of counting crimes and collating reports, etc. etc. This is why international comparisons are, at best, slippery and intellectually dishonest because of how easily incomparable statistics are distorted to say exactly what gun-grabbers want them to say instead of simply telling us the truth. What is the truth, you may ask? That gun control doesn’t work even when comparing a country against itself before any particular law or package of laws was passed, and even if crime did go down afterwards there is still not even so much as a correlational link between that and gun control laws.

    This is why we must never allow them to object when we trot out failed states like Mexico and Venezuela, either, because it’s just as useless to compare the U.S. to them as it is to compare it to any place in the Euro Zone. We are practically nothing like Europe or even Canada, and neither Europe nor Canada are anything like us. THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT. And for any similarities there might be we must also remember they are only skin-deep at most.

    And yes, to Mr. Quests surprise, the rate-per-million of deaths from mass shootings is indeed (un)surprisingly higher in Europe than it is the U.S. It is definitely higher now with self-radicalizing of both naturalized citizens and foreign-born migrants that subsequently started shooting up theaters and delis.

    Predictably, Mr. Quest makes an attempted coup de grace, having failed in every other avenue to refute anything Mr. Pratt has said. He falsely accuses Mr. Pratt, in the form of a question, of being willing to put up with a certain level of violence instead of considering policies that have been shown to him to be completely fruitless in preventing any particular kind of crime whatsoever. When he fails to bait him, tries to paint Mr. Pratt is cold, heartless, and unreasonable for not pursuing policies that he personally finds himself willing to be subject to, now knowing for a fact (whether he accepts it or not) that none of the proposed restrictions would have done a single thing to prevent any tragedy. The terrorist attacks in France are a perfect example of this: strict yet ineffective gun control laws combined with unrestricted movement within the Shengen Zone.

    In conclusion, Mr. Quest succeeds in nothing more than showing himself to be guilty of whatever callousness, ignorance, and unwillingness that he knowingly, falsely accused Mr. Pratt of possessing.

    P.S.: Perhaps if he only knew the racist history, and present, of gun control in America then maybe he wouldn’t be so giddy to give up his sacred civil rights in exchange for pure security theater that will never render him safe under any circumstance whatsoever. Like, the TSA, for example.

    • One thing that I was surprised that Pratt did NOT refute was the claim that our murder rate is 10 per 100,000. It isn’t. It was that high in the 1980s, but it has been steadily dropping ever since, and is at levels not seen since the 1950s.

  9. Why are we even arguing with guys like this? Its a total waste of time. We have 2nd Amendment RIGHTS; if you don’t like it, come and take them. Instead of arguing with with these asshats, we should spend time taking newbies to the range. We should work to elect candidates who support a RIGHTs agenda. We should support NRA’s efforts as the big dog in this hunt and we should STOP talking to people who are never ever going to agree with us. End of story.

    • In court, bad or even false evidence trumps no evidence. We need people armed with the facts and good debating skills to defeat the anti-gunners in public forums.

    • I think we are better off with Mr. Pratt right where he is. Let the NRA be the boogeymen while GOA does their thing.

  11. CNN and other Media think by hiring a non citizen to make arguments supporting changing American law will sound better with an English accent.

    • He sounds like someone hit him in the chest with a sledgehammer though. It’s annoying how wheezy he is. According to wiki, he was a methhead, so he probably still smokes something.

  14. Richard Quest? You mean the same CNN sexual deviant (one of many at THAT network) nabbed by NYPD in a Central Park Men’s Restroom a few years ago propositioning men for sex while wearing a **ock-cage, having a pocket full of methamphetamine and a piece of rope for asphyxia play, THAT “Richard Quest” the one CNN had promised would NEVER again appear in the U.S. market? Whoopsie!

  16. …. Hmmm ….

    Paraphrasing- “What do tell the people around the world….?”
    First, this is NOT the business of people around the world. The United States is Constitutional Republic, which answers to the People of The United States; not to people who left their home countries to come to our land (to then violate our laws like Richard Quest.) We have laws which prohibit the sale, possession, and use of crystal meth. That did stop people like you Mr. Quest once, but likely missed you on multiple other occasions.

  19. It always seems easy from the audience or living room couch. There are always points missed or not made as forcefully as they could have been. Still, I’d say he did an outstanding job. One must remember, as well, that he’s up there on his own, whereas the host has producers in his earphone feeding him points and counterpoints. So it’s not quite mano-a-mano, in the sense of just two adversaries.

    Just assessing the performance as it was, without getting into what the overall strategy could or should have been, I really only have two minor criticisms to make.

    First, don’t lean so heavily on the Second Amendment. That’s an appeal to higher authority tactic and it’s vulnerable to tangent arguments about new amendments and court rulings. It makes it easy to dismiss you as an anachronistic absolutist and possible anarchist. Just state the 2A, its purpose in historical context and current affairs, the necessary path for amending the Constitution, and move on. One’s natural, human, and civil right to self-defense trumps the 2A, anyway.

    Second, don’t allow assertions that “you won’t agree to any restrictions whatsoever on firearms” to go unchallenged. Letting them pin that label on you, again, marks you as a crazy absolutist and, thus, readily dismissed.

    It also ignores the fact that there are already innumerable restrictions, aka infringements, upon the 2A. Come back with examples of infringements, so you don’t succumb to a false dichotomy: it isn’t a matter of zero restrictions vs. sensible restrictions. Numerous restrictions already exist and despite growing gun ownership and falling homicide rates, they still want more.

  20. I wouldn’t talk to this to this CNN British globalist F***K head anyway! This Fake News tool is just trying to argue with reasoning away an American civil rights! Especially, this British Tool should be toosed out of our country…Maybe we should pay repartions to the British Monarchy for the American Revolutionary war!

Comments are closed.