Cold Dead Hands

The most unfortunate thing about actors passing away is the wanton airing of their cheapest movies on every television channel.

These 'tributes' make me sick. Depending on how you look at it they're either capitalising on the death of a really nice person, or they're glorifying a real prick. In the case of Charlton Heston I feel it's the latter.

This man was more obsessed with attention than your average myspace whore. He thrived as an actor in a time when horribly theatrical over-acting was considered desirable. Fueled by his self-adoration and the lust for fame he found his only solace in a large audience.

In a time when racial segregation was taking hold, he spoke out against it because that guaranteed him adulation amongst his more liberal peers and fans. When more liberal viewpoints became mainstream and he could no longer incite applause by spouting empty rhetoric he changed his political affiliation from democrat to republican and began his attention-seeking chest-beating once again. This time though, he'd found a home for himself amongst redneck America.

If you've read the second amendment to the US constitution -- and most gun nuts have not -- then you probably already know that it's being abused by gun rights activists simply because it was poorly written, and even more poorly thought out at the time of writing. Here it is in its entirety:

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.

Worst sentence ever. Worse than any of mine and I'm not writing the basis for laws which will be used to place instruments of death into the hands of people who can barely read. I don't care where you put the commas, that's still a really shitty sentence.

I'm not going to debate the meaning of the word 'militia' nor will I try to define 'the people' or ask you to put yourselves in the frame of mind of those who wrote the amendment way back when. Frankly it doesn't matter to me what they were thinking since they were clearly smoking too much of that peace pipe when exercising that kind of grammar.

I also don't believe it would matter to your average gun-nut whether the second amendment said something like:

Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.^®

They would still claim gun ownership as their birthright because that's what gun-nuts do, and Charlton Heston was their angry screaming poster-child.

Rednecks will worship anyone who beats their chest about gun rights, and Heston beat his with passion and was worshipped for it by the millions of members of the NRA of which he was president from 1998 to 2003.

What isn't being widely reported is that Heston actually campaigned against gun proliferation (rather, in favour of gun control) while he was at the height of his career and following the deaths of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 60s.

Unfortunately as his desirability on celluloid decreased, his descent into megalomania and self-worship drove him to disregard logic and his better judgement in favour of the emotional rantings of redneck America.

I won't deny that Heston was an intelligent and articulate man with many extremely valid points of view, but that simply can't excuse one of those views being that little NRA gem: that every citizen should be allowed encouraged to carry concealed firearms because this would deter criminals from resorting to gun violence.

A healthy brain inside an otherwise intelligent individual simply cannot ever draw that conclusion. It's completely ridiculous to purport to solve criminal gun violence but simultaneously exponentially increase the incidence of gun death.

It's also impossible to make a credible and logical argument about gun rights while protesting gun restriction by hoisting a rifle above your head and yelling something maniacal like:

...from my cold, dead hands!

There's nothing at all respectable about the weight and credibility he offered an organisation which is eerily close to being the political wing of American domestic terrorism, and whose political and social clout is responsible for a significant part of America's gun violence.

At least we can take that gun now, Charlie.