“You can have my guns when you pry them from my cold dead hands” became a popular saying among supporters of the Second Amendment during the 1980s and ’90s, and caused the liberal media to go ballistic when, at a speech delivered to the NRA in 2000, Charlton Heston concluded his remarks by raising a Kentucky rifle above his head and intoning, “From my cold dead hands.” A thunderous standing ovation followed.

Many media leftists thought the great actor was now at the nadir of a downward trajectory that had begun in the mid-1960s when he began moving in a conservative direction. Here was a Hollywood actor who had starred in dozens of movies, had been awarded an Oscar for Best Actor for playing Judah Ben-Hur, had participated in two civil rights marches in the early 1960s, and had been awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for “outstanding contributions to humanitarian causes.” What gives? They didn’t appreciate that Heston had grown up hunting in the woods of northern Michigan, had served in World War II, and was a staunch supporter of all 10 Amendments of the Bill of Rights. Unlike many so-called civil rights advocates, Heston did not skip over the Second Amendment. Moreover, he even thought it the most essential of all.

He made this abundantly clear in a 1997 speech at the National Press Club luncheon in Washington, D.C. “It is America’s first freedom,” declared Heston, “the one that protects all the others. Among freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly, of redress of grievances, it is first among equals. It alone offers the absolute capacity to live without fear. The right to keep and bear arms is the one right that allows rights to exist at all.”

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