May 27, 2016 Show with Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America PLUS Dr. John Wilsey on American Exceptionalism & Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to having you in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen.

Good afternoon Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 27th day of May 2016 on Memorial Day weekend Eve and I hope that God richly blesses you all this weekend as you prepare for a nice long time, at least most of you, a nice long three-day weekend of gathering with family, friends and loved ones and I hope that God blesses you with safety and refreshment and invigoration and fellowship and leading those that you know and love to Jesus Christ when you have the opportunity and of course don't forget the veterans that you know, the veterans in your community and those in your own family and the families of those veterans who are deceased who have laid down their lives for the freedoms that we enjoy in the United States of America.

Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment, and Memorial Day

So I just wanted to wish you all a happy Memorial Day before I run out of time but I think that it's a very apropos that we have today as a guest on Memorial Day weekend Eve, Larry Pratt who is the Executive Director Emeritus of Gun Owners of America and Larry Pratt is the Executive Director, as I said, of this organization which is a national grassroots organization representing more than 1 .5 million Americans dedicated to promoting their Second Amendment freedom to keep and bear arms.

Gun Owners of America lobbies for the pro-gun position in Washington, D .C. and is in Washington, D .C. and is involved in firearm issues in the United States. GOA's work includes providing legal assistance to those involved in lawsuits with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Firearms Law Enforcement Agency and Pratt has appeared on numerous national radio and TV programs such as CNN's Piers Morgan, NBC's Today Show, CBS's Good Morning America, CNN's Crossfire and Larry King Live, Fox's Hannity and Combs and many others.

He has dedicated, he has debated, I'm Jr. of Ohio, Charles Rangel of New York and Carolyn McCarthy of New York, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Vice President Al Gore among others. His columns have appeared in newspapers across the country and he published a book, Armed People Victorious in 1990 and was editor of a book, Safeguarding Liberty, The Constitution and Militias in 1995.

His latest book, On the Firing Line, Essays in Defense of Liberty was published in 2001 and Pratt has held elective office in the State Legislature of Virginia. Serving in the House of Delegates, Pratt directs a number of other public interest organizations and serves as the Vice Chairman of the American Institute for Cancer Research.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first on Iron Shark, Art Sharpens Iron, Larry Pratt. Welcome, brother. Can you hear me? That's interesting. Larry, what happened to Larry Pratt?

For some reason, our guest is not on the line and I have no idea why. So we're going to go to a station break earlier than we thought. No idea why Larry Pratt is not on the line with us and God willing, he will be returning any second now.

So if you could, please stay tuned with us while we go to a commercial break and find out what happened to Larry Pratt because he was on the phone just a few minutes ago. So I'm not sure what happened here.

Anyway, if you'd like to join us, by the way, with a question for Larry Pratt, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a Christian perspective.

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Welcome back, and I believe we now have Larry Pratt back on the line with us. Larry?

Okay, sir. We're working now.

I'm not sure what happened, but I'm glad that God seems to want you on the program today since we have a reconnection here. And it is my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron, Larry.

Well, I'm delighted to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

And let me repeat our email address. If anybody would like to join us on the air about gun ownership with a question, email us at chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please provide your city and state and residence and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

Well, I already gave a description before you came back on the air with us of GOA, Gun Owners of America. How, Larry, did you personally get involved in GOA, and what began this enthusiasm with you over guns and the Second Amendment?

Enthusiasm over Washington, D .C. I've been with the American Conservative Union, among other formed gun owners of an office because he knew that if he were going to lobby the Congress, that had to be done from Washington.

I got hooked up. Increasingly, excitement of even sometimes people on our own side taking a position that can only be amended by the rather laborious procedures laid out in the Constitution, at liberty.

Yeah. And in fact, I want to give a plug to our listeners if you also want to listen to other programs that I've done on the subject of gun ownership. After this program is over, of course, you can go to our archive at ironsharpensirenradio .com and look up our interview with John M. Arlott, who is the author of More Guns, Less Crime.

And you can also look up our interview with Dr. Ron Gleason, who has a book that is soon to be released by Solid Ground Christian Books, solid-ground-books .com, on the Christian and the Second Amendment.

So you can find those interviews at ironsharpensirenradio .com. But what I was saying during the initial introduction at the beginning of the program, Larry, is that I think it's a very fitting subject, Guns Owner of America, to be discussing this on the eve of Memorial Day weekend, because don't you believe that this issue is at the heart of what America has always had as a bulwark against tyranny?

A country that is filled with armless sitting ducks is basically open game for a tyrannical power to move in and become a dictatorship over helpless people. Am I right?

Most definitely. There's two aspects to being defenseless, disarmed, that people ought to consider. One is that what we have legally designated gun-free zones. The penalty might be for violating the gun-free zone law, something much more in mind than that.

But to your point particularly, people are told to buy ammunition and new firearms by people fleeing Cuba followed by Venezuela. I'm afraid that our president doesn't seem to have any problem.

We do have a listener in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York, Tyler, who asks, why do you think that President Obama is trying to blame weapons rather than the people who own them to go out on these massive and psychotic shooting sprees?

I guess you could expand that to more than just President Obama, but every leftist not only in the United States but in the world who does not believe in private gun ownership or at least wants to make it very difficult.

And frankly, there are plenty of Republicans to go around who have reported that, if only tacitly, by, in the case of congressional Republicans, they had the opportunity to defund various Obama programs that would have declined to do so.

And they simply know Obama has been able to. And part of that is a very concerning medical diagnosis, starting with the veterans, turning them over to the Justice Department, and now becoming a much more government-wide problem under President Obama, where these diagnoses become the predicate.

If you have one, you can't have a gun. And we've actually had members tell us about knocks on the door, relating medicine and gun control. We ought to be extremely concerned about this, because this is what Hitler did.

This is what Lenin did.

Yeah, you know, it's ironic, and I'm assuming this must be purely out of ignorance, but you have a lot of liberal people who obviously are those who are foremost opposed to gun ownership rights, or at least they want to make them extremely more difficult.

And yet, they could very well be sitting ducks under a regime that despises what they believe. For instance, if you go into countries where there is Sharia law under Islamic rule, those liberals would be the first to have their heads on the chopping block for their views on sexual immorality and so on.

There are many reasons why liberals should not even want their guns taken away. Even you have a lot of liberals who are claiming that the police in the United States are involved in a police state kind of a situation, and where they feel helpless and harmless.

It doesn't even make sense that liberals in that group within the African American community and so on would want to have weapons taken away, especially even when you have people in those high crime areas.

Now, I'm assuming that most of those guns being used in crimes and murders and so on, in the urban areas especially, I'm assuming those are not legally owned guns, but even if they were, wouldn't it make more sense for those people to be armed to protect their homes and their family and themselves?

...by the government, and they're thinking that except a government might do. They'll say, well, it's something that we need to have, it's probably somebody buying a gun, but they would recoil in horror if you suggested electronic media, including the internet.

So they get it in some places, they like guns except in the hands of the government. In trying to use the government, use the state people because they're assuming people can't own a gun for any good reason.

I don't think they look at it and their thinking ends up saying, without them really, I don't mind all the dead bodies from the criminals, I just don't want cops running around with guns.

Yeah, it's really absurd when you think about it. Now, obviously there are those, even who claim to be Christian, who have a liberal bent on this issue. They view Jesus Christ and his meek and mild and humble attributes only.

They forget about him turning over tables in the temple.

With a cat-and-nine-tails.

Right.

Particularly nasty instrument.

Right. But they go to passages which command that we turn the other cheek and distort them and so on. Why do you think that gun ownership is completely compatible with being a Bible believing Christian and an obedient Bible believing Christian?

On the website gunowners .org, we've got a fact requirement of innocent life. That's why we have police. But it goes beyond that because the Constitutional Republic, them under God, under Constitution, under law.

Because they've looked at the Bible from, I guess I would argue, their own perspective rather than trying to let Scripture itself, which it's quite capable of doing. And that's what we tried to do in the piece Find a Concealed Wicked, is the same.

In other words, giving away doesn't mean letting somebody through. To him, that's why we should be armed and able to protect ourselves and those that we're responsible for. And every man who's the head of a household has more than his own skin that he's responsible for.

So obviously you do not believe that Jesus Christ taught pacifism.

No, he didn't teach it when he was whipping the money. Nothing in the New Testament, I think, could be shown thinking which tried to use a really minor sword, which would be intended, it was limited to this thing.

And the only thing that a real man could challenge to the duel. One of the things that Christians taught, that's being slapped on the cheek, that's exactly what Christ was talking about, that you don't respond in kind.

If your life is not being threatened, keep your gun in its holster.

Yeah, it's interesting that even Jesus Christ, when he was confronted by soldiers asking him questions, he said that he just told them to not take money from anyone by force.

Right, don't be a thief, don't kill others.

Right.

And Peter responded by cutting off Malchus' ear when they were coming in from the temple the night. He didn't say, Peter, what in the world are you doing with that sword?

Right.

Like he didn't know, right? Like he'd only had dinner. He was praying. I don't think my father could have sent a legion of angels. Not the time to use it, Peter. That was the point. None of the disciples, nobody understood that God had actually come to earth.

And so Peter arose and got his sword and was going to defend for doing it.

And it's interesting that John the Baptist also told the soldiers to be content with their wages, so that would infer that he wanted them to continue being soldiers.

Absolutely. He was indicating earlier, just said, you know, don't take advantage.

And of course, those who are liberals and leftists, who are not pure pacifists, like say the Amish and others, they would.

By the way, have guns to shoot animals with.

Right, right. But those that are your typical left-leaning Democrat or left-leaning Republican who is in favor of very strong, strict restrictions on gun ownership, they would even agree that the military needs guns and weapons and so on.

So isn't that interesting? It's okay for somebody else to kill, but not them. Is it really a universal requirement that God would have of us that we want to go back to say as we might encounter mandated killing of the aggressor, of the kidnapper?

Yes, it's interesting how these same left-leaning individuals claim very often to be the champions for the defenseless, the poor, the women of society, the children of society, and yet they would rather than be sitting ducks without weaponry of any kind, especially the women in the inner cities and so on.

How could you really be in favor of women's rights and in their best interest if you want them to be unarmed in dangerous places? It doesn't make any sense to me.

My guess is that most are talking about, because if they had the money, they'd do it.

Right. And that goes to another area of hypocrisy. We're going to go to a brief break, but before we go to the break, I want you to think about something that I have said to people who will rebuke me when I say anything in favor of gun ownership and so on, gun rights, the NRA, whatever you may think of when you're thinking of gun ownership, liberals who are typically, at least in their rhetoric, the ones who are far superior in their calling for the rights of minorities and the impoverished and so on, I will say to them tongue-in-cheek, you know something?

You're right. I think that only the rich, white, and powerful should own guns. And then, of course, they would say, what on earth are you talking about? What are you, some kind of a racist? And I would retort to that.

No, I'm not the racist. You are, because you're the one that actually believes that. You may unconsciously believe that. But if you're saying that the government should be in control over all guns in a nation, you're really saying the rich, white, and powerful are the only ones who should have gun ownership and should have control over all of them.

I'll have you comment on that when we return from a break. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. If you'd like to join us, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Zarnes, and if you just tuned us in, our first guest today on the program is Larry Pratt, who is the Executive Director Emeritus of Gun Owners of America. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

But, Larry, if you could respond to my sarcastic tongue-in-cheek retort that I give to liberals who try to shout me down against gun ownership. And my retort, as I said earlier, was a sarcastic reply.

Yeah, sure, I think you're right. We should only allow the rich, white, and powerful to own guns. So, if you could respond to that.

Well, maybe they would be happy by just shifting the Soviet Russia, only the communist elite. Idiom means you got only the... Is that really what they want? Being some kind of historic...

Yeah, in fact, a lot of what the liberals on TV, the pundits, and the talk show hosts, and others who chuckle at the conservatives who believe very passionately in gun ownership and support the NRA and other things like that, they chuckle at us because they think that we are like paranoid, frightened people who have this science fiction view of our government here in the United States morphing into something like the Nazi Germany of the early 20th century, and they think that that's ridiculous, that's never going to happen in a place like the United States of America, are you kidding me?

And they just think it's laughable that we would think that, oh, we got to have our militias ready to overthrow the government in case it becomes a tyranny and a dictatorship again, or whatever.

Well, they've never talked about Nazi and other... Do you think it would have made a difference?

Of course.

What world are you living in? And so to call paranoid...

Yes, and they also, these liberals and leftists seem to be totally blind as to what could occur when we don't even know how many centuries this planet has left in store for it, we don't know with certainty when Christ is returning.

And who knows what could happen over a span of time, like 20, 30, 40, 50 years, 100 years, what could happen to a country like ours? America may be completely evaporated from the face of the earth in such a period of time.

There were an awful lot of people in Germany ending up becoming a totalitarian monopoly. Other countries, the Cubans that I've talked to, something like this, fought Batista with Castro, fought the dictator preceding Castro.

And then when they toppled him, and it turned out that lying through his teeth, he really was a communist, it wasn't just a figment of the State Department's imagination, and that he was turning out to be even worse.

And he went back and saw with his own eyes, he got out of people's heads, make it out of these countries, the ones who, that didn't come easy. No, many Cubans have fled shark-infested straits between Florida and still find a body that's been eaten by sharks.

Yeah. And we do have a listener. It's actually a frequent co-host on Iron Sharpens Iron. Reverend Buzz Taylor is listening today. He's on vacation day as his daughters are visiting Carlisle, Pennsylvania from Maine and other places, spending a nice day with them.

And yet he still finds time to tune into Iron Sharpens Iron, and he has a question for you. Reverend Buzz asks you, if I should ever have to actually use my handgun for defense purposes, is it true that I would lose my right for exercising it?

Jurisdiction are where that, God forbid, that sort of thing might happen. If you're in New York City, the first question might be, how did you get the gun? Legally, crimes against persons. He deals with what happens to have to use my firearm.

If you're in San Francisco and many other cities, you could be in real trouble. So you probably need to think this thing through before you decide you're going to be carrying a firearm. And it's enough that I know I was kind of aware of Maryland and Virginia and the district.

I'd gone to school in the District of Columbia. I had left the area to take a job opportunity to come back and head up the American Conservative Union. And I knew almost without thinking, after having lived in the area, there's no way I'm going to live in the disconvenient to get into the district from Maryland ahead of time.

No way. And I did my house hunting in Virginia. And it wasn't so much because of the taxes, although that was certainly one of the factors. But mainly it's that, at least in Virginia, there's not a presumption against your defending yourself.

And we do have a listener, Harrison, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, do you have any idea why it is that even many very conservative Christians in Europe, when it comes to their theology and doctrine, who are in alignment with the conservativism in the United States, when it comes to biblical inerrancy and morality and the family, etc., why it is that many of these European brethren are very much in favor of gun control and actually applaud our President Obama for his views of strict rules against private gun ownership?

Keep in mind, Mike, because I've actually had to face mental Europe, and it's really stunning that the use of the word conservative in England, but the only thing in common between politically in the two places, and it's largely the same in the rest of Europe, it's not uniform, but it's pretty much the same, they're simply knowing the government of the people being in charge.

We even have a difference in America, those of us who were here by birth, in Europe, and both thinking, in fact, the reason they were leaving England is because their Christian beliefs simply no longer comported, they had to get out of Dodge.

And that, I think, helps explorative, just doesn't mean the same thing over there as it does here. They look at us as crazy people, our militia tradition, and it had gotten a good shot off at him, would have been doing a good thing, something like that over there, and you just get a kind of stunned silence.

Well, you know, that actually brings me to another question. There are people, in fact, I would say the majority of conservative Christians in the United States do believe that the Bible is very clear that we are to be submissive to the governing authorities over us because we believe God has ordained those authorities, even if we dislike them.

And so how do you respond to the fact that a Christian, even if we're overrun by a tyrannical government, should just the argument would be we should just be willing to submit to them even if we hate it and despise it because we are just being obedient to the Bible?

Well, if we're being obedient in the situation you describe, we're not being obedient to the Bible. We're being obedient to you defying God as being a minister of God, a servant of God. And you can't, I don't think, make a very good case that Stalin I think it's a major to think that Romans 13 is talking about being submissive to any Tom that comes along and says, I'm the government, now you obey.

The proper Christian response is, do you understand the Hebrew Republic? Do you understand what Paul was talking about? If you don't, then talk later, see if you understand after due study.

Well, what about, like, for instance, I know that this is just a very tiny minority these days of Christians, but there is a tiny handful of Christians maybe it's bigger than I know it to be, but it's at least a very silent or rarely heard group of people who actually believe that the patriots of the 18th century, the colonists and so on, were in sin when they started a revolution against the British throne for independence of the colonies.

They say, even if they enjoy the freedoms that procured for them today, they believe that that was actually sin on the parts of those colonists, and obviously back then there were loyalists who were Christians who agreed with that notion.

How do you respond to that kind of a thing?

Well, I think they're just missing the point of what we've been assuming, that because that made him automatically legitimate, that would mean Stalin was legitimate, or that Hitler. And frankly, I think the only thing wrong with the officers' plot to blow up Hitler, the bomb on the wrong side of a heavy oak table, was that they screwed up.

You know, it's too bad the bomb didn't do what it was intended, people might well have been succeeded. The idea that anybody in power who says, I'm the government now, you've got to obey me, really? Finger to God?

And we're saying that's legitimate? I really find that appalling.

And when it boils down to it, aren't those, at least those who are genuine Christians, who truly cherish the Second Amendment and the freedoms and the rights to bear arms that we have here in the United States, isn't it true that the real root of that is not because they are bloodthirsty and want to shoot, harm, or kill people?

They want to protect innocent life, which should be a goal of all humanity. And according to what the liberals' rhetoric is, that is a part of their, it seems, main part of the agenda that they profess is to be protectors of the underdog and the helpless and innocent.

Isn't that really just at the root of why people want to own guns who are coming from a biblical standpoint?

I think that biblical standpoint very much comports with what the Founders had in mind when they gave us the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment was based on a recognition that life is a gift from God, not from the government.

And when the government acts without authority, which is laid out in Scripture, life, take the life of a rapist, but once you've gone past those enumerated areas where the taking of life is legitimate, to say that any government is legitimate completely misunderstands, fails to think through what it is that Scripture actually teaches and what the Founders of this country, when you read what the colonial pastors were preaching, about the king, it's clear that the king was the guy that was the lawbreaker.

And it was the, often, it was the preachers themselves. In fact, I am now looking at a reproduction of a painting on my wall of Pastor Peter Muhlenberg in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. At the beginning of hostilities of our war for independence, there's a time, flung off his coat at the end of the cloak at the end of, now there's a time for peace, this is a time for war.

And he was dressed in a colonel's uniform in the American Colonial Army under soon-to-be General Washington. He strode down the aisle of his church outside and mustered his men, and many of them signed up on the spot they rode off to fight with General Washington, not to return until the war was over.

That's what our Second Amendment is designed to protect us against George III, and if George III insists on it, for us to be able to shoot him.

We do have another listener in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Christian has a three-part question, and they're all excellent, so I'll permit three parts. Is there anyone that you believe should not be permitted to own guns?

What do you believe should be required of an American citizen before he can own a gun? And do you believe there are any weapons at all that should be restricted from private ownership?

Well, let me start with the third. I think it's pretty clear from not only the Second Amendment, but the Militia Act of 1791, which was virtually contemporaneous with the final ratification. What the founders had in mind was the right of the arms of the day, the average soldier.

Now, they provided for cannons and whatnot in the Militia Act, but they made it clear that if you were in a company that was involved with artillery, that would be a machine battle rifle. About so that an instant army, there would be a militia to take on George III if need be.

Give me the first two.

Is there anybody that should be restricted from gun ownership, in your opinion, and what would be the requirements of somebody, an American citizen, in your opinion, before they are able legally to own a gun?

Well, I don't think there should be any requirements. Once the government gets involved in that, then the creature of the Constitution all of a sudden becomes the creator. And it takes its creator, telling people you can't have a gun.

If somebody's in jail, he shouldn't have a gun. When he gets out of jail, there's no way you're practicing that in gun-banned cities like Washington, D .C. So not only I think the government should be involved, so I don't think the government should be saying that I can't have an M16 or a .38, and the government shouldn't be involved in trying to sell my next-door neighbor a .38 revolver.

If I do something, it becomes their business, and everybody else, to keep us from sticking up a 7 -11 with my .38.

Well, it's interesting that many conservatives would be very much in favor of stricter punishment for those who commit crimes. And it may even include punishment that follows them outside of their prison cells when they are paroled or set free, etc.

I'll give you an example like a child molester. That person very conservative people and very conservative Christians are often very much in favor of that person having a scarlet letter, if you will, something that identifies them to the communities where they live as a danger to children.

Would you not think that a dangerous criminal might have something that follows him outside of prison with his restriction in regard to gun ownership?

If we don't think somebody can be trusted outside of prison….

That's a good point. Well, I'd like you to sum up in about a minute what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today before we leave.