The article below is an excerpt from an article about the 1996 Election from the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal Thursday April 11, 1996. The PA 6th Congressional District included parts of Lancaster County at that time.
“Pratt is executive director of Gun Owners of America. He left the Buchanan Campaign after the media reported on his ties to the Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacist group Aryan Nation.
Pratt has indorsed Sellers and will be the keynote speaker at a fund-raising dinner for Sellers next week.
Sellers said the allegations against Pratt are untrue and that he sought Pratt’s support because of his expertise on gun issues.”
Larry Pratt was one of the speakers at the Second Amendment Rally in Washington, DC today.
From Southern Poverty Law Center:
False Patriots
Eight Lanes Out
Larry Pratt, 58
Larry Pratt, a gun rights absolutist whose Gun Owners of America (GOA) has been described as "eight lanes to the right" of the National Rifle Association, may well be the person who brought the concept of citizen militias to the radical right.
In 1990, Pratt wrote a book, Armed People Victorious, based on his study of "citizen defense patrols" used in Guatemala and the Philippines against Communist rebels — patrols that came to be known as death squads for their murderous brutality.
Picturing these groups in rosy terms, Pratt advocated similar militias in the United States — an idea that finally caught on when he was invited for a meeting of 160 extremists, including many famous white supremacists, in 1992.
It was at that meeting, hosted in Colorado by white supremacist minister Pete Peters, that the contours of the militia movement were laid out.
Pratt, whose GOA has grown since its 1975 founding to some 150,000 members today, hit the headlines in a big way when his associations with Peters and other professional racists were revealed, convincing arch-conservative Pat Buchanan to eject him as a national co-chair of Buchanan's 1996 presidential campaign.
The same year, it emerged that Pratt was a contributing editor to a periodical of the anti-Semitic United Sovereigns of America, and that his GOA had donated money to a white supremacist attorney's group.
Pratt is today close to the extremist Constitution Party and its radical theology.
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