A conservative radio host on Wednesday warned Fox News that President Barack Obama was "becoming more like Hugo Chavez all the time" and that any effort to control guns in the wake of the Newtown massacre would be "like Nazi Germany."
Vice President Joe Biden, who is heading up a task force on gun violence, told reporters on Wednesday that the president was likely to take executive action in response to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, but he did not give specifics.
"There are executives orders, there's executive action that can be taken," the vice president said. "We haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required."
The onservative website Drudge Report soon was blaring the headline, "WHITE HOUSE THREATENS 'EXECUTIVE ORDERS' ON GUNS" -- accompanied by photos of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
And within hours, Larson was bringing the Nazi Germany reference to Fox News viewers.
"If he does executive orders, he's becoming more like Hugo Chavez all the time," Larson insisted. "Under [Sen. Diane] Feinstein's bill -- which has now been introduced -- if the president plans to go that way, everybody in America who owns one of the guns on the list will be required to go in and give up fingerprints, mug shot, be entered into a database."
"It will be, '[give us] your papers please,' like Nazi Germany," he continued. "We're going to register everybody then you won't be allowed to transfer that gun... So that the day that grandpa dies and you don't know that he's got an AR-15 locked up in his safe and the police come for whatever reason and discover it there, the family is guilty of possessing a gun and possession of which is a felony."
Larson also worried that any effort to strengthen mental health checks would mean that "any person in America who's on any kind of prescription pharmaceutical -- Xanax, Prozac, lithium -- loses his Second Amendment rights."
"If you go to see a doctor or marriage counselor and say, 'Our marriage isn't working out well, we yell at each other a lot.' And the marriage counselor says, 'Well, there go your Second Amendment rights.'"
