Heston was the public face of gun rights

updated 7:45 p.m. ET April 6, 2008

WASHINGTON - As Moses, Charlton Heston thunderously rallied his people with the Ten Commandments in hand. The tablet of his political life was carved with something else — the Second Amendment.

Heston was not just the public face of the gun-rights movement but a good deal of the fire in its belly during a transformational time in the decades-old debate.

He lived to see Democrats running away from a cause they once embraced, scared off by the likelihood that they lost the 2000 presidential election in part because of their gun-control advocacy.

For a conservative champion like Heston, that was pretty close to the Promised Land.

His death Saturday night brought tributes from public figures whose fortunes were linked in some way to his.

President Bush praised his commitment to liberty. Former first lady Nancy Reagan remembered Heston’s long association with her late husband.

Video   Heston dies April 6: Screen legend Charlton Heston dies at the age of 84. MSNBC

Ronald Reagan, like Heston, was an actor who became more conservative over time — fellow strangers to Hollywood’s Democratic mainstream — before walking into an Alzheimer’s twilight.

The most pointed tribute may have come in 2003, when Heston stepped down after five years as president of the National Rifle Association, enfeebled by symptoms of the disease.

“Were it not for your active involvement,” Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told him, “it’s safe to say my brother may not have been president of the United States.”

Moses of gun rights
It was in the 2000 campaign that the NRA went after Democratic candidate Al Gore with a vengeance built up over years of confrontation with the Clinton administration and its “jack-booted government thugs,” as others put it.

The Moses of gun rights may have had too regal a bearing to use such incendiary words. But in attacking a Democrat who favored mandatory photo ID licenses for future handgun buyers, Heston held little else back.

As he had once lifted Moses’ staff in “The Ten Commandments,” Heston held a musket above his head and dared Gore from afar to pry it “from my cold dead hands.”

Gore lost blue-collar votes to Bush in an election so close any setback was perilous.

The key finding from 2000: About half of voters were from gun-owning households, and they voted for Bush by 61 percent to 36 percent. Voters from households without guns backed Gore 58-39.

Ever since, Democrats in presidential and many congressional and governors’ races have scrambled to establish their bona fides as hunters, if they can, or as admirers of firearms or the Second Amendment if they can’t.

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