March 3, 1999: Feature: Conservatives at the Gate

Let My People Own Guns
Charlton Heston takes aim at the Left

Text of Heston's speech at Harvard Law School

Ross Douthat, Deputy Editor

"Do we have any weapons? Any guns?" Charlton Heston's character asks in Planet of the Apes. One of the apes replies that they have the very best, but that they "won't need them."
        "I'm glad to hear it," Heston says. "I want one anyway."
        Thirty years later, Charlton Heston still wants a gun, and he's not afraid to tell everyone about it. Recently elected President of the National Rifle Association, he's not afraid to talk about the joys of gun-owning in Hollywood, arguably the most liberal and anti-gun city in the country. And on February 16 he was willing to come to Cambridge, arguably the second most anti-gun city in the country, to spread his message of Second Amendment absolutism
        No one can accuse the old actor, star of Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, and various other heavy-handed epics from the heavy-handed era of film-making, of lacking political courage. But then, opponents of the NRA have plenty of other epithets to fling his direction, as Heston himself admitted in his Law School address. "I've been called everything from ridiculous and a dupe, to a brain-injured, senile, crazy old man," he noted wryly, then added with a smile: "Now I know I'm old, but I sure-Lord ain't senile."
        Maybe not, but any NRA president makes an easy punching bag for the "civic-minded" and "liberal" in today's society. By its very nature the NRA must defend the broad interpretation of Second Amendment rights, just as the ACLU must defend the broad interpretation of the First Amendment. And when the issue is guns, the broad interpretation has a way of looking extremist and dangerous to public safety.
        This was made clear at the end of Heston's presentation, when many of the questions seemed intended to hold up specific NRA positions to ridicule. How, the aging actor was asked, can his organization oppose keeping handguns out of the hands of spousal abusers? Or support the sale of armor-piercing bullets? Or refuse to help ban semi-automatic weapons? Heston handled the questions well enough, but often he seemed to dance around the issue, as if trying to avoid the difficult implications of the NRA's positions.
        Unfortunately, the NRA is an easy target, and it is difficult to argue against small-scale gun-control programs without seeming to care more about bearing arms than saving lives. Heston understands this problem, and his address made the case that the issue of Second Amendment liberty is part of a larger "cultural war" raging in American life, and that attempts to limit the rights of gun owners are part of a larger pattern that denies freedom to conservatives.
        While the "culture war" bogeyman is a rather tired image in conservative thought, Heston's basic premise is sound. Even if one agrees with small-scale gun-control measures, the motives behind the anti-weapon crusade are ultimately more dangerous than the weapons themselves. The principle argument against the Second Amendment seems to be that guns are dangerous; ergo, guns should be illegal or controlled rigorously. In other words, government exists to protect people from dangerous things - or rather, from their own stupidity in handling those dangerous things.
        It is true that America has a gun violence problem when compared with countries like Great Britain, Canada, and Japan. On the other hand, some of the disparity disappears when one considers the relative size of the populations and the fact that countries with low crime rates tend to be racially and culturally homogeneous and geographically contained. The sprawl and diversity of the USA are as much factors in the higher crime rate as our liberal gun laws. Besides, do we really want to turn our weapons (all 220 million of them) over to the state, as the British and Canadians have done?
        Probably not. The idea of the state as "nanny" has roots in many things, but the American idea of freedom is not one of them. Indeed, Heston put it well when he said that if the notion that security is more important than freedom had always been accepted, "we would still be King George's boys, subjects of the British crown." We're not, and therein lies the entire purpose of the Second Amendment:: to keep us free by concentrating power in the hands of the citizens, not "King George."
Concentrating power, of course, means concentrating responsibility. This is what makes the anti-gun project so peculiarly pernicious: by vilifying weapons and gun manufacturers as responsible for accidents and crimes, it lifts responsibility from the agents of those accidents and crimes and places it on the shoulders of inanimate objects and faceless corporations. It teaches Americans to blame others for their own mistakes.
        Maybe Charlton Heston is right to fear that the political apathy of our generation betokens a passivity and an acceptance of a creeping pseudo-liberalism. But somehow, seated in that auditorium surrounded by good liberals who have never owned a gun and never will, it was hard to feel terribly worried. Sure, maybe some gun manufacturers will face ridiculous lawsuits. Maybe a few more restrictive laws will be passed that hand chunks of our freedom away to King George. But there are 220 million guns out there in America, beyond the ivory towers of Cambridge and the tinseled domes of Hollywood, and no one is taking those away. Our Second Amendment rights are as safe as anything.

There is a tendency among '90s conservatives to adopt a bunker mentality, to insist that the forces of moral degeneration are winning the culture war and that the apocalypse is imminent. But there is a wider world out beyond the Charles and Sunset Boulevard, a place where as many people go to church as did in the halcyon 1950s, a place where everyone owns a gun and "conservative" is not a dirty word. It is a place with its problems, including a debased popular culture and a distressing tendency to elect men like Bill Clinton. But it is not the conservative-hating Gomorrah that some right-wingers like to imagine. In the end, it is still our America, and if our country is in trouble, well, we have Charlton Heston on our side and we shouldn't worry. The man carries a gun.