I thought I would send this out because there was a little expose about
how
Charlton Heston has been missed but not forgotten in his days living
with
Alzheimers........Enjoy!
PHILADELPHIA (AP)
June 8, 1998
Two days after assailing President Clinton's character and views on
guns, Charlton Heston was
elected on Monday as the next president of the National Rifle
Association.
At the group's convention over the weekend, Heston urged members to
close ranks to fight
gun-control advocates. "Get together," he said, "or get out of the
way."
NRA CONVENTION
June 6, 1998
"... Too many gun owners think we've wandered to some fringe of
American life and left them
behind. ..."
"... Mr. Clinton, sir, America didn't trust you with our health-care
system. America didn't
trust you with gays in the military. America doesn't trust you with
our 21-year-old daughters,
and we sure, Lord, don't trust you with our guns."
TIME MAGAZINE SPECIAL REPORT
July 6, 1998 (Vol. 151 No. 26)
"... The day I became president, I don't think I held the gavel 10
minutes," he boasts. "I did
29 media interviews that day. ..."
"... I've been doing interviews for 50 years," he says. "I know how to
sell a movie or a book.
Now I'm selling the reputation of the N.R.A. ..."
"... Now his positions track the N.R.A.'s. Trigger locks? "A ludicrous
invention. If you can't
put it on a weapon without taking the bullets out, why put it on?" A
five-day waiting period?
"It's hard for me to accept that a guy says, 'I'm going to kill that
s.o.b., but, darn, I have
this five-day waiting period.' He probably still wants to kill him
after five days." Ban
Saturday-night specials? "The black and Hispanic women who clean
office buildings until 3 a.m.
and then walk home – of course, they want a handgun in their purse."
Limit purchases to one gun
a month? "It's the camel's nose in the tent. Look at Stalin,
Mussolini, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol
Pot, Idi Amin – every one of these monsters, on seizing power, their
first act was to confiscate
all firearms in private hands. ..."
SPEECH TO NATIONAL PRESS CLUB
September 14, 1997
"... You do not define the First Amendment. It defines you. And it is
bigger than you. That's
how freedom works. It also demands you do your homework. Again and
again, I hear gun owners say,
how can we believe anything the anti-gun media says when they can't
even get the facts right?
For too long, you have swallowed manufactured statistics and
fabricated technical support from
anti-gun organizations that wouldn't know a semi- auto from a sharp
stick. And it shows. You
fall for it every time. ..."
"... I simply cannot stand by and watch a right guaranteed by the
Constitution of the United
States come under attack from those who either can't understand it,
don't like the sound of it,
or find themselves too philosophically squeamish to see why it remains
the first among equals:
Because it is the right we turn to when all else fails. That's why the
Second Amendment is
America's first freedom. ..."
"... Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a
weapon against a dictator
or a criminal intruder. Yet in essence, that is what you have asked
our loved ones to do,
through an ill-contrived and totally naive campaign against the Second
Amendment. ..."
LETTER TO THE NY TIMES
Printed May 12, 1998
"... The Founders' intent in framing the Second Amendment is perfectly
clear and undeniable.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "No man shall ever be debarred the use of
arms." Some anti-gun elitists
declare this notion outdated. However, many constitutional scholars
from this country's most
prestigious universities agree that the Founders' intent is clear and
irreversible: To "keep and
bear arms" is a right for all law-abiding citizens. ..."
MSNBC TV
September 14, 1997
"... The First Amendment is crucial. Of course it is. So are all the
others. And the Second
Amendment is the one that guarantees that people can bear arms to
protect themselves. ..."
Fox News Channel
September 15, 1997
"... There's no such thing as a good gun. There's no such thing as a
bad gun. A gun in the hands
of a bad man is a very dangerous thing. A gun in the hands of a good
person is no danger to
anyone except the bad guys. ..."
"... You could say that the paparazzi and the tabloids are sort of the
'assault weapons' of the
First Amendment. They're ugly, a lot of people don't like them, but
they're protected by the
First Amendment – just as 'assault weapons' are protected by the
Second Amendment. ..."
Fox News Channel
May 18, 1997
"... He [President Clinton] boasts about 186,000 people denied
firearms under the Brady Law
rules. The Brady Law has been in force for three years. In that time,
they have prosecuted seven
people and put three of them in prison. You know, the president has
entertained more felons than
that at fund-raising coffees in the White House, for Pete's sake. ..."
NBC "Meet the Press"
May 18, 1997
"... Let me make a short, opening, blanket comment. There are no good
guns. There are no bad
guns. Any gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the
hands of a decent person
is no threat to anybody – except bad people. ..."
"... Teddy Roosevelt hunted in the last century with a semiautomatic
rifle. Most deer rifles are
semiautomatic ... it's become a demonized phrase. The media distorts
that and the public ill
understands it. ..."
"... You know, the Bill of Rights guarantees every citizen the right
to own and bear firearms.
It doesn't say anything about how many, how much you can pay for them.
That's in the Bill of
Rights. That's a sacred document in our country. There's no other
country in the world that has
such a document. And you know what its purpose is? To prevent the
federal government from
interfering with private citizens' rights. ... If you will read what
the Founding Fathers wrote
when they were writing it – Jefferson, Mason, Madison, Patrick
Henry, Tom Paine – e
very one of them wrote at great length that they were talking about
the individual rights of
individual citizens. ..."
"... We have to pass on to America in the 21st century the same Bill
of Rights that those wise,
old, dead white guys that invented this country passed on to us. ..."
HESTON TAKING ON TIME WARNER'S PROMOTION OF "COP
KILLER" ALBUM
(Conversation between host Tony Snow and Charlton
Heston)
SNOW: "You have one of the great voices in the entertainment world. A
few years ago, you showed
up at a Time Warner stockholders meeting and started reading the
lyrics from a rap album and
just froze everybody in their tracks."
HESTON: "That was that terrible album by Ice T called 'Cop Killer.'
And I'm very proud of this,
I really am. I owned some Time Warner stock and I went in and
confronted their full board
meeting and read the lyrics. I can't repeat them on television."
SNOW: "No, you can't."
HESTON: "And I shamed Time Warner, the largest entertainment
conglomerate in the world, into
firing Ice T and dropping the album. Now, he threatened to kill me. He
hasn't done that yet."
SNOW: "I believe your quote was something like 'Let him try.'"
HESTON: "Well, maybe I scared him. And I haven't gotten a job from
Warner Brothers since or a
good notice in Time, but I'm as proud of that as anything I've ever
done."