Gun Owners of America’s executive director, Larry Pratt, commended states that have passed laws “nullifying” federal gun regulations, saying that states should arrest federal agents enforcing gun laws that they think violate the Second Amendment, just as they should have ignored the Fugitive Slave Act to arrest slave-catchers coming into northern states.

In an interview on VCY America’s “Crosstalk” program on August 4, Pratt fielded a question from a caller who asked what Americans can do “when the man in the Oval Office lacks competence” and is possibly “borderline insane” like “Nero, Hitler and Mao Zedong.”

The answer, Pratt said, was nullification.

“We’re blessed in this country that we do still have something left of our federal system,” he responded. “And there are a number of states that have passed laws in one area or another that have told the feds, ‘Don’t stick your nose in here.’ And, in fact, in some of the cases, and I’m thinking of Kansas particularly, if they find that you’re involved in unconstitutional activity regarding the Second Amendment in Kansas, they’ll arrest you. And that’s the way it should be.

“That’s what states did in the run-up to the War Between the States. Many of the northern states, I remember specifically Wisconsin enacted legislation that led to the arrest of a slave-catcher who had pursued a slave into Wisconsin, and they nailed him and they put him in jail.”