Charlton Heston: The President’s Column

Source: American Rifleman/NRA
Published: July and August 2000– Volume 148,
NO.7 & 8 (115th year of Publication)
Author: Charlton Heston

AUGUST 2000: What’s in store for your guns and your rights if Al Gore and his anti-gun allies win in November’s elections? For a glimpse, just look at the deceit, double standards and hypocrisy that Gore and the anti-gun lobby wield as weapons against our Second Amendment freedom.

The “Million Mom March” is a perfect example. What started out as an effort to make kids safer-and who could oppose that?-turned into a political pep rally and get-together, but a carefully choreographed, massively-funded political game. It wasn’t about making kids safer–it was about re-electing politicians. It wasn’t about doing something proven to save kids’ lives-but about laws guaranteed to kill your freedoms.

Why else would the organizers of the moms’ march refuse to support child gun safety programs proven to work? At the NRA, we gave them the chance: Match our million dollars with another million to bring gun safety education to every kid in America.

We even gave the option: Support our Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program-that even the Reno Justice Department has endorsed-or any equivalent program that genuinely makes kids safer.

Yet the march organizers flatly refused, finally admitting their real goal wasn’t protecting kids, but “the licensing of handgun owners and the registration of handguns.”

Rosie O’Donnell, the queen bee emcee of the march, personifies that kind of double-dealing hypocrisy. Rosie has said, “I think there should be a law that no one can have a gun in the U.S. If you have a gun, you go to jail.” Yet last spring, Rosie’s bodyguard applied for a concealed-carry permit from the Greenwich, Conn. Police Department.

When confronted with her hypocrisy, Rosie said she still does not “personally own a gun.” Well, who needs a gun when you live in Greenwich with whole-house security systems and armed body guards? Young single mothers, the urban poor, all those little people, Rosie, can’t afford what you take for granted. Yet you would strip them of their only protection, while keeping it for yourself and your caf? latte elites. It’s a fraud and a disgrace.

Another sham is the anti-gunners’ constant comparison of automobiles to firearms. Two organizers of the moms’ march said they had modeled their movement on Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) also tries to sell his anti-gun schemes by pointing to the success of MADD.

But MADD didn’t succeed by suing brewers, vintners and distillers. It didn’t succeed by licensing drinkers, registering six-packs or requiring locks on liquor cabinets. It cut the drunken driving rate by demanding strict enforcement and prosecution of drunk drivers. In other words, enforcing existing laws-the same proven principle that saves lives through Project Exile.

Licensing drivers and registering cars doesn’t protect kids from traffic. What protects kids from traffic is teaching them to look both ways before crossing the street-just as Eddie Eagle protects kids by teaching them not to play with guns.

No one can misinterpret the real Clinton-Gore objective: They don’t want to take away criminals’ guns-they want to take away your rights. At the NRA, we’ve been exposing the Clinton-Gore lies for what they are, and the media and American people are beginning to listen. But we need more Americans to listen-and then to take action in November.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: This is the most important election for gun owners in a century. If you want to protect your guns and your rights, you must be a single-issue voter. Register to vote and get fellow gun owners to do the same. Volunteer for pro-gun candidates. Invest your freedom by renewing your NRA membership or making a contribution to NRA-ILA.

Together, we can defeat the gun-haters and defend our liberty. I’ve signed on for a third term of office as president of the NRA to do exactly that. Join me and our freedoms can live on for future generations.

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JULY 2000: In the media circus surrounding the Democrats’ and Republicans’ national conventions, too many Americans get lost in the posing, pandering, strategy and spin–and lose sight of what really matters. Election 2000 poses a survival-or-surrender ultimatum for your gun rights. And the contrast between the candidates couldn’t be clearer.

For a definitive picture of what Clinton and Gore mean for you and your rights, I can think of no more profoundly appropriate images than those of an M1-A1 Abrams battle tank among the smoldering cinders of Waco and a Kevlar-clad federal agent battering down a suburban door and snatching 6-year-old Eli?n Gonzalez in the middle of the night at the point of an MP5 submachine gun. These are the bookends to Janet Reno’s eight-year tenure of blunders, blinders and abuse.

In justifying her Miami machine-gun raid against Eli?n Gonzalez’s relatives, Reno said, “There was information that it might be possible that there were guns in the home.” In other words, Reno was willing to risk the lives of several federal agents and a 6-year-old boy simply because “it might be possible that there were guns in the home?” What about the tens of millions of American families that exercise their Second Amendment rights–and most surely have guns in the house?

Why put young Eli?n in such peril? Was he in danger? Was he being abused? Was he a hostage? No, no and no. Yet still Reno charged forward, bristling with federal agents, tear gas, battering rams and machine guns. Why? Maybe simply because Clinton, Gore, Reno and the rest didn’t trust the courts, refused to work within the system, and decided to risk everything to pursue their own ends.

Even Harvard’s liberal constitutional scholar, Laurence Tribe, wrote, “Ms. Reno’s decision to take the law as well as the child into her own hands…strikes at the heart of constitutional government and shakes the safeguards of liberty.”

This is the legacy of Clinton-Gore “justice”: eight years of lawlessness, lying, executive end-runs around the law and extramoral, extralegal, extraconstitutional excursions into the territory of tyranny. It’s un-American. It’s dangerous. And it must stop.

When this Administration uses self-righteous bureaucrats and above-the-law lawyers to sidestep the law, bypass Congress, commandeer the courts and then do whatever it wants–something is radically wrong.

Look at their legacy. Clinton-Gore officials conspire with scores of cities to simultaneously sue the gun industry out of existence–and justify doing so by refusing to enforce their own existing laws.

When the American people don’t support what they want, Clinton, Gore and company unleash legions of greedy attorneys to blackmail gun manufacturers into accepting bans and restrictions that neither the Congress nor the state legislatures see fit to adopt.

They sidestep the Constitution, short-circuit the legislative process, subvert the judiciary and refuse to be bound by law–all with the intent of forcing lawful Americans to forfeit their freedoms.

Clinton and Gore say the rules don’t apply to them. I say they do.

Now it’s time to take back our freedoms. November 7th is “V Day”–”V” for vote and “V” for victory.

We all know where Al Gore stands on firearms freedom. He wants to turn your rights into privileges. He wants to license you, make you apply for a photo-ID card, take tests and pay various fees–but you can bet that’s just his foot in your front door.

Licensing is just registration by another name. Once some Gore government has the names, addresses, photos and ownership inventories of every gun owner in America, we all know what comes next. Once liberty is transformed into license, that license can be revoked.

When Clinton and Gore smile and say, “No one wants to take away your hunting gun,” don’t believe them. That’s what they said in England and Australia, while hundreds of thousands of ordinary handguns, rifles and shotguns were rounded up and melted down.

A press agent at Handgun Control, Inc., which hopes to spend 10 times as much in this election as in 1998, said, “Never has there been a more critical election for our issue.”

That’s why it is so monumentally important that you register to vote and become a single-issue voter in the November 7 elections. Unless gun owners turn out in full force on Election Day and give anti-gun politicians a resounding rebuke, then our rights are no safer than little Eli?n Gonzalez.

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