“Charlton Heston… stood before a convention of gun owners on Saturday, raised an 1866 Winchester rifle above his head and defiantly proclaimed in a weak voice, “From my cold dead hands.” Not quite ready to leave the limelight after stepping down on Friday as the president of the National Rifle Association…
“Heston made public last year that he had symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease, a degenerative brain ailment, and had to be helped across the stage LaPierre on Friday night.”
- from Reuters
Heston’s Last Stand must have been a stirring sight, and I’m sorry I missed it. Thank god I live in a country where it’s still legal for old men with degenerative brain diseases to wave deadly firearms around in public places.
[Heston bids farewell: “Who
are you people? I’ll kill ya!”]
Almost lost amid the Heston-festin’ was the keynote address by Governor Jeb Bush, wherein he told the NRA, “Were it not for your active involvement, it’s safe to say my brother would not be president of the United States.” So that’s one more item I have to add to my list of yet-to-be-written thank you notes to the N.R.A.
Bush went on to say, “The Second Amendment is called ‘America’s First Freedom’ because it is the one we turn to when all else fails… The Second Amendment is America’s original ‘Homeland Security Act.’”
Cynics might argue that in the past couple of hundred years there haven’t actually been any situations wherein Americans have defended their homeland using their own personal aresenals. But to say that this means we won’t ever have to do so is lazy, inductive reasoning. Plus, when I consider that our federal governent has apparently decided that they don’t have enough cash to fund even a third of my fair city’s defense, I realize it’s time for me to grab my .45 and guard the perimeter so that I can pick off the next 747 or cloud of anthrax that dares to darken my door.
Is there a middle ground between completely outlawing guns and selling ‘em in public school cafeterias? Something like a few closed loopholes, better background checks, improved safety locks, and more accountability for irresponsible manufacturers and dealers?
Um, no. As Jeb said yesterday, “The sound of our guns is the sound of freedom.” Whether that sound issues from a pitched battle against foreign marauders or from a parent’s closet containing only a couple of six year-olds, it’s the same sound. The sound of freedom.
Fanny Roborat
15 comments
Renee
April 28, 2003 at 4:21 pm
1You might enjoy reading the transcripts from a show I watched the other day (about a week ago) — NOW by Bill Moyers on PBS. It was in large part about the NRA, how we have software databases that track crime and gun dealers which can help to protect us, but Rumsfield has completely stopped it since he came into office! Very facinating information. Check it out…PBS is down now or I would have given you the link.
Rana
April 28, 2003 at 4:44 pm
2Yes… I remember hearing about this issue about the time that the Washington, D.C. area snipers were wreaking terror upon their fellow citizens. But, no, we don’t want to hear about them, now do we? They might add some complexity to the moral equation. Can’t have that!
Georgette the good
April 28, 2003 at 5:55 pm
3“…The sound of our guns is the sound of freedom…”
And the sound of my retching…???
Joshua Scholar
April 28, 2003 at 6:28 pm
4Thank god I live in a country where it’s still legal for old men with degenerative brain diseases to wave deadly firearms around in public places.
Is the money shot, er that’s a great sentence. The rest goes too far I think, but that sentence is a keeper.
tim
April 28, 2003 at 7:39 pm
5Love the pic of Chuck. For a minute there, I thought Saddam was back.
N in Seattle
April 28, 2003 at 8:12 pm
6Correction, I believe, to Renee’s note — Dubya’s chief “defender” of the Second Amendment is Attorney General Ashcroft, not Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Under the Patriot Act, the feds can intrude on our library books, our email, our video rentals, our music CDs, our magazine subscriptions, our credit cards, and so on and so forth, but any and all information about gun ownership is specifically excluded from what they are permitted to obtain.
The laugh/cringe line I’ve been using is that Ashcroft believes that the Bill of Rights contains only one amendment … well, actually, only half of one amendment (conveniently forgetting that phrase about a well-regulated militia).
Brian C. B.
April 28, 2003 at 9:50 pm
7Yep, I thank God for Chuck Heston and Jeb Bush every time my Braille edition of Guns ‘n’ Ammo arrives. Without them, who knows if we could keep the Redcoats at bay.
Tiffany
April 29, 2003 at 7:40 am
8Thank god I live in a country where it’s still legal for old men with degenerative brain diseases to wave deadly firearms around in public places.
Sounds to me like you’ve met my stepfather.
He’s a card carrying member of the NRA and yet he can’t figure out why we neither own a gun or will allow him to teach my children to shoot.
I prefer to teach them the damage guns can inflict and then let them make their own choice.
David
April 29, 2003 at 3:34 pm
9No wonder the rest of the world think us mad as hatters.
Steve
April 30, 2003 at 1:17 am
10I’m an old man (47), an NRA lifer who joined the NRA before it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. I remember a time when the NRA defended the whole US Constitution, not just the 2nd amendment. This was long before the proposal by NRA President Harlon Carter that we place all drug users and sellers into concentration camps in the Arizona desert. Long before the dreaded Operation CrimeStrike, which would have vastly increase mandatory minimum sentences. Long before John “Register Muslims, Not Guns” Ashcroft took over the Justice Department.
I’m a card-carrying member of the NRA and of the ACLU, and for the same reason. Both organizations defend the US Constitution. Too bad the ACLU tiptoes around the 2nd amendment, and that the NRA forsakes all of the Bill of Rights BUT the 2nd amendment.
Where do we go from here? I’m open to suggestions.
adam
April 30, 2003 at 2:46 pm
11It has long seemed to me that a middle-ground reading of the Second Amendment might be necessary:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Pro-gun people like to emphasize the second part of the amendment, while anti-gun folks accentuate the first part.
It might be helpful for both sides to apprise themselves of the reasoning behind the Bill of Rights itself:
http://www.constitution.org/dhbr.htm
But most importantly, to me, it’s a question of justice and relevancy. Nobody debates the fairness or relevance of the First Amendment. What’s absent from the debate about the 2nd is the question of whether IT ought to be amended - either to make possession of guns MORE explicitly legal or less so. After all, it took an explicit reversal of Constitutional precepts to impose an income tax (16th Ammendment).
Undeniably, much of the founding fathers’ concern that led to the 2nd Amendment concerned militias. Nowadays, we tend to forget about the previously-conceived importance of armed forces for each semi-autonomous state.
So to some degree the 2nd Amendment has been re-purposed. This is not a good thing for either side of the gun debate, because it inevitably means we’re arguing about a single sentence that really CAN be read in two ways. So the arguments concerning what it MEANS have no chance of persuading the opposition.
This is the kind of problem that biblical scholars find themselves in all the time; it’s what leads to the fracturing of religions. What we need to remember is the fortuitous fact that the Constitution is NOT a static document, and that we’re free to debate what’s right rather than interpret text that time and circumstance have rendered obscure.
Lee
October 29, 2003 at 8:32 pm
12The founding fathers believed that the militia were all of the people and that people had the right to bear arms for personal defense and as a hedge against tyranny.
I am more concerned that guns make a convenient foil for politicians who are afraid to take on social issues like unwed motherhood, low graduation rates, the export of American jobs, gangster rap, a culture that denigrates African-American women by calling them “bitches and ho’s,” and celebrates irresponsibility on an epic scale. The statistics say undeniably that homicide is very much an inner city problem (about 350 murders in D.C. about 25 in Northern Virginia), but politicians are afraid of the honest racial dialogue that it would take to change the culture of the inner city. I have faith that one day we can change the culture of the inner city so that all the freedoms promised by our founding fathers can be handled by all Americans. As far as I’m concerned, there is no need to dumb down the constitution and create a least common denominator culture.
Dominic
November 2, 2003 at 10:03 pm
13I find the attitude against private firearm ownership in America a harbinger of worsening times to come. When a people dismiss as irrelevant the ability to respond to the worst elements in society they deserve the consequencs of that action. In short, you lay down your arms, you are at the mercy of those that have decided that they know best and have decided that they by force of arms will make those decisions for you. If a citizen believes that they are better off unarmed so be it. I do not, and as a good citizen and neighbor I ask that you give me the same courtesy and leave me to live in peace as I do you. In closing I quote Ben Franlkin, “Those that surrender liberty for safty deserve neither.”
Aaron Roberts
August 30, 2005 at 2:55 pm
14you people are idiots. Guns dont kill people, people kill people. Jeb is right, the sound of our guns is the sound of our freedom. If the second amendment is broken, our constitution will surely falter. then america will go to hell in a hand basket
Joe
December 5, 2005 at 4:36 pm
15The NRA is only upholding the constitional rights of us all. It is interesting how you all forget the attacks of 9/11 so easily. Perhaps we may not be able to use our arms to defend our household against major attacks, but we can use them to defend our homestead from an attack on it. That is what the constitution calls for, not taking down 747s. If a terrorist enters your house and attempts to take your family hostage, you will feel quite weak and powerless when your family is taken advantage of by terrorists. Being the head of the household, it is our duty as men to protect our families and we shouldnt be doing things that only tie our hands from defending our kin.