Heston was the public face of gun rights

After a student shot five people dead and then himself on the campus of Northern Illinois University in February, Democratic presidential rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted their support for the right to bear arms.

Old positions, such as Clinton’s support in 2000 for a federal requirement for state-issued photo gun licenses, were brushed aside. Clinton told an audience her dad taught her to hunt, and said to reporters that she shot a duck in Arkansas.

On his way to the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, John Kerry donned a flannel shirt and rubber boots on a hunting trip where he shot pheasants. In the 2004 campaign and again this year, John Edwards played up his hunting days.

To gun control activists, Heston was brought forward as a palatable, even comforting, face for a movement they consider extremist, aggressive and sophisticated.

Heston hadn’t been a box-office star since the 1970s but upon his departure as NRA president, Eric Howard of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence credited him as a persuasive actor for his cause.

Heston was good at “acting as though these extreme measures — basically, what the NRA is doing — aren’t extreme,” he said.

Taking up other issues
Heston took up other issues, including violence in entertainment, and he marched for civil rights in the 1960s.

In 1992, he stunned a Time Warner annual meeting by reading aloud lyrics from an album by Body Count, a band featuring rapper Ice-T. The album included songs about killing police and sodomizing women.

“It’s often been said that if Adolf Hitler came back with a hot movie synopsis, every studio in town would be after it,” Heston said. “Would Warner’s be among them?”

In response to such protests, Ice-T pulled the song “Cop Killer” from the album.

But gun rights are where Heston most left his mark.

He became NRA president in 1998 as the group was dealing with internal strife and hostility from Bill Clinton’s administration and many in Congress. It raised its membership to 4 million members during his time as president.

After the 2000 election, Gore’s campaign spokesman, Doug Hattaway, recalled flying over Gore’s home state of Tennessee and overhearing two men talking in business class. “The problem with Al Gore is he’ll take our guns away,” one said.

“I knew we were in trouble,” said Hattaway.

That exchange, it could be said, was his Holy Moses moment.

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