An overrated legacy

Charlton Heston most certainly isn’t rolling in his grave. If anything, his cold dead hands have temporarily come back to life and tightened their grip on the antique rifle he’s no doubt entombed with in a posthumous victory. One of his most cherished beliefs was validated by the country’s highest court last week: the civilian right to keep and bear arms.\nHeston, as you may know, died this year. The big-time movie star turned stalwart conservative did more to protect and call attention to the Second Amendment than any politician of his generation.\nAlthough we all know a surprising number of people who couldn’t tell the difference between the “arms” mentioned in the Constitution and the appendages hanging from their upper bodies, I’m confident that an equally impressive number were left queasy by the Court’s decision. It has already rallied the rifle-toting reactionaries of our time, those who have adopted the un-mindful attitudes that allowed the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres to happen.\nBy “reactionaries,” I don’t mean Heston, who was in fact a poised and respectable advocate for his cause. To give a better example, I once lived in a town where pick-up trucks rolled around with bumper stickers reading “CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT,” a swipe at then-president Clinton, who signed the 1994 assault-weapons ban into law. And it’s not like I was seeing the same truck over and over again.\nAs if that wasn’t sufficiently close to home, I also grew up in a household where a considerable arsenal of ammunition and small arms rested in a safe on the other side of my bedroom wall. Perhaps because of my gentle, artistic disposition, my parents successfully kept this secret from me for several years. \nI’m glad I found out sooner or later, just to remind me where I stand on this historic ruling. I don’t deny the virtue of the argument proclaimed by Heston in an essay for the American Bar Association’s Human Rights Magazine: that the Second Amendment was, in no minor sense, “America’s First Freedom.” You can’t blame our colonial ancestors for preferring to have guns in their hands when leaping out of the bushes at those numerically superior British redcoats. \nBut you can blame today’s self-righteous, ideologically motivated NRA and related gun groups who began a countrywide crusade last week against cities with strict gun-control laws in the wake of the Court’s ruling. Their aim is not the logical preservation of self-defense, but a voracious and impetuous pursuit of hastily defined legislation that will leave gun-fearing communities even more fearful. \nCapitalizing on public anxieties to combat the ambiguously defined specter of “victim disarmament” (that banning guns only takes guns away from law abiding citizens, not criminals) fails to achieve what the founders of these groups originally intended to do. They wanted to bridge the gap between gun safety and gun accessibility and to encourage an atmosphere in which both interests can thrive. Their ideal was not to scare the hell out of people, humiliate those who feel genuinely threatened and to make guns seem more of a priority than human lives.