Amos Stevens
New Member
NRA bids a loving farewell to Heston
By Frank Cerabino, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2003
ORLANDO -- The National Rifle Association bid a loving farewell to actor Charlton Heston, who took the stage Saturday for the final time at the group's annual convention, and managed to briefly hold a rifle in the air, and muster up one more, "From my cold, dead hands!"
The homage to Heston put a surreal layer on this annual event, which brings together 50,000 gun owners -- nearly all of them white, and most of them ardent Republicans -- for a weekend of gadget shopping, networking and competing in everything from duck-calling championships to seats on the governing board.
Country singer Toby Keith sang Friday night. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush spoke Saturday night. There was even an NRA-sanctioned comedian, Bill Engvall, who quickly got the crowd on his side by saying what he thought of Natalie Maynes and Rosie O'Donnell for criticizing President George W. Bush.
"If you don't like the way this country runs, and you don't love who's running it, move," Engvall said.
The crowd roared its approval.
Yes, this was the scene of a constant, yet odd, profession of patriotism and constitutional freedom. It was a not-so-well regulated militia kind of patriotism, a flag-draped cadre of self-anointed freedom fighters who stand ready to protect America from anybody they don't like -- maybe even you -- with weapons nobody's got any business knowing about, regulating, or making safer.
No 'foreign media' allowed
In the spirit of comical paranoia that ran deep here, no "foreign media" were allowed to cover the event. And the group's executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, who refers to the NRA as "Freedom's Second Army," unveiled the NRA's own homeland security Web site.
This site, at first, would be available only to NRA members and would give them more information on national security threats than they might get from the government.
"We don't have to be idle civilians waiting for the government to make us feel safer," LaPierre said as he unveiled NRAsafe.com
"Our members, more and more, are looking for us to provide news," he said.
And who are these members? There are 4 million of them, according to the organization.
"I come from a college town that is 90 percent anti-gun, so it's good to come here and feel I'm among like-minded individuals," said Ned Lamb, 55, of Hubbardsville, N.Y. "It's been hard in America to stand up for what you believe in."
Lamb thinks individuals, not government, should take the ultimate responsibility for their safety. And gun control makes that tougher.
"When those people on Flight 93 in Pennsylvania took on those terrorists, that's what the NRA is all about," he said.
So I moved on, where Mitchell Plyler, 14, from McConnells, S.C., was holding a pistol and firing laser shots at a target.
His mother, Marsha, walked up.
"Would you mind if your son owned a gun?" I asked her.
"He's already got three or four," she said. "He's been shooting since he was 8."
Marsha Plyler is a seventh-grade math teacher. I asked her whether she was concerned with children carrying guns to school.
"I used to carry one in my glove compartment," she said. "But I can't anymore, because I'd get fired."
The NRA convention is a good place to feel tough. You can hold thousands of guns in your hands and pull the trigger. The constant soundtrack of the exhibit hall is the metal-on-metal clicking of triggers being pulled.
And you can buy all sorts of macho bumper stickers for your car, such as "Warning! Driver only carries $20 worth of ammunition," "Don't Bother Me... I'm Reloading," and the timely "President Bush, Way to Go. Kick their Ass and Take their Gas."
You can go to the interactive training displays, where helpful salesmen will show your children how to kill bears, elk and deer. Lessons are taught with laser gun simulators that display the circulatory system of the animals.
"Find the heart," salesman Dan Atkinson said. "To drop the animal you need to get maximum blood loss."
No, this was no place for the Bambi bunch. On one wall, the mounted heads of 16 whitetail bucks were roped off. These animals have impressive sets of antlers, and hunters lined up to gawk.
Not far away, a South African named Kobus Prinsloo was offering to take hunters on a $4,500 safari in which he promised them a kudu, a wildebeest, a red hartebeest, a warthog, and two impalas.
"You take the trophy and we take the meat," he said. "Next week, I'm going for elephants."
For relief, I headed to the game-calling competition, where competitors were graded on their calls of seven varieties of game. I got there for the professional competition among coyote callers. The mood was golf quiet. No applause between competitors. And they were introduced by number, not name.
I tracked down Doug Benefield of Georgia, the star of his own hunting show, Turkey Tales, right after his coyote routine, which includes squawking into a plastic caller and using an empty plastic cup to imitate a panting dog.
"What I was doing was trying to simulate a hunting situation with an alpha male getting a cottontail," he said. "The dog is just something a little extra I threw in."
Another competitor, Brad Harris of Neosho, Mo., does his routine with a large green balloon stuck between his knees. At the end of the routine, he punctures the balloon.
"What was the balloon for?" I asked.
"That was the gun going off," he said. "I did it to add realism."
There were gun activists of every stripe here.
One of the more entertaining guys was Jim Dunham, who goes by the name Kid Reo, and walked around dressed like a 19th-century cowboy, putting on exhibitions of his gun-handling skills.
Dunham belongs to an organization called the Single Action Shooting Society, whose members gather in their get-ups to do something called cowboy action shooting.
"We're not reenactors dressed in cowboy clothes shooting paintballs at each other," he said.
These guys fire real bullets at targets while perched on stagecoaches, or after pretending to walk into a saloon and catching a card cheat.
"Most of us who got involved in this sport fell in love with cowboys and Indians in the movies," he said.
Dunham tried to drum up some interest in his particular fascination with guns.
"It's very family friendly," he told a group after an exhibition. "Women are thrilled to be able to put on costumes and go out and shoot their guns."
Not far from where Kid Reo was trying to recruit people who wanted to dress like cowboys, I met Janet Hansen, the chief executive officer of the Varmint Hunters Association, which puts out a magazine called The Varmint Hunter.
This is an association for people who go out and shoot prairie dogs, skunks, raccoons, woodchucks, and a variety of other critters not suitable for mounting.
"There's no season on varmint hunting," Hansen said, ticking off one of the benefits. "It's not unusual to shoot about 350 rounds a day."
I wondered aloud whether animal rights organizations ever got in the way of varmint hunters who needed to kill that many animals.
"I live in South Dakota," Hansen said. "There might be animal rights people in South Dakota, but they keep quiet."
Few black members
It took me a few hours at the convention before I realized that, of the thousands of members I had seen there, I couldn't recall any being black. So I asked at the NRA press office about black membership, and was told the association doesn't measure the racial or ethnic breakdown of its members.
On my second day at the convention, I spotted a black woman, Lage Jonsson, on the convention floor.
"I'm not a member," she said.
"Are there any black members here?" I asked.
"There's one on Aisle 11," she said.
So I went to Aisle 11, where Max Williamson was one of the salesmen for bio-Secure, a company based in Boca Raton that sells bulletproof doors and access-control devices that recognize fingerprints.
Williamson is black and an NRA member.
"How many black people are NRA members?" I asked.
"About point oh, oh, 1 percent," he said, then laughed.
"Why?"
"We don't see the possibilities of being involved," he said. "But I'm a businessman and money only comes in one color: green."
Another group of people hard to find at the NRA convention were the Million Mom March protesters. You'd think with a name like that, they'd be easy to spot.
But there were only about 35 of them, and they were assigned a protest spot that was about a quarter-mile away from the NRA entrance. The moms were actually protesting the NRA in front of the site of the American Telemedicine Association convention.
As I spoke with Mary Leigh Blek, the national director of the moms, she kept talking about the NRA and pointing to the building in front of where police made them stand.
"The NRA's not here. They're way over there," I said, pointing way beyond where we both could see.
"Oh," she said.
Blek, who says she's a lifelong Republican, wants the world to know that the NRA doesn't speak for her or her party.
"We are a problem-solving nation," she said. "And unfortunately, we have let gun policy be dictated by the NRA."
Blek became a gun-control activist after her 21-year-old son was shot and killed during a robbery nine years ago. She says sensible gun control would keep more guns out of the hands of children and criminals.
"It's not about the Second Amendment," she said. "We don't want to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. We're just trying to protect everyone's rights to life."
The Florida branch of the group sent a letter to Jeb Bush to protest his decision to speak at the NRA convention while refusing to meet with the gun-control group.
"While we understand that, as governor, you have a rule in welcoming visitors to our state, we don't understand why this would take precedence over a meeting with mothers who have lost children to gun violence," the letter said.
Bush went beyond giving a welcome to the NRA convention. He gave the keynote address at the members banquet Saturday night, and was listed as "an unflinching defender of personal freedom and Second Amendment rights."
The governor, like his brother, is counted as a reliable friend of the NRA, which lavishes sympathetic candidates with campaign cash.
The NRA Political Victory Fund claimed that 21 of the 25 U.S. Senate candidates it supported last year won their races, and 232 of the 242 NRA-supported House candidates won their races. And that in state and local-level races, 82 percent of the association's candidates came out winners.
Jeb stays in good graces
Jeb Bush spoke very much like a grateful recipient -- past and future -- of the NRA's good graces.
The governor credited the NRA with helping his brother, President Bush, win the 2000 presidential election.
"Were it not for your active involvement, it's safe to say my brother may not have been president of the United States," Bush said.
By the time Bush spoke, Heston was long gone, back to California.
Heston announced last year that he had become stricken with Alzheimer's disease, and the progression of that disease kept him from spending much time at this event, which marked the end of his five-year tenure as the group's most beloved president.
The NRA was determined to see him out as a real-life Moses, a role he played in the movies.
Heston's cowboy silhouette, rifle on his shoulder, was the official logo for the convention. And Friday night's tribute to him was a separate-ticket event, attended by about 7,000 members, and one bald eagle, which swooped over the crowd as the national anthem played.
LaPierre unveiled a larger-than-life bronze statue of Heston dressed in his gun-toting role as Will Penny, in the movie of the same name. And the audience was treated to a 38-minute video of Heston's efforts to protect gun rights.
The NRA store at the convention featured numerous Heston-themed items, everything from Heston shot glasses ($5) to a folding knife with Heston's signature inscribed on it ($80). And if buying Heston's book The Courage to Be Brave wasn't enough, you could also buy 100 minutes of excerpts from 28 of his speeches, all compiled on a tape titled Patriot at the Podium.
Heston, 78, would spend only a brief moment at the podium this weekend.
In his two appearances, he ambled slowly on stage, and spoke to the convention through videotaped messages recorded earlier. He made no mention of his illness on the tape, talking only about the group's accomplishments and his desire to see the fight for gun rights continue.
"You do the work of warriors," he said on the taped message. "A summer soldier and sunshine patriot will shrink from battle. You must not."
The NRA also pre-taped Heston handing over the gavel to the man who follows him, Kayne Robinson, an NRA vice president and former chairman of the Republican Party in Iowa.
Heston was on stage with the board only for the first few minutes of Saturday's meeting, and he didn't actually speak to the audience until LaPierre presented him with a final gift, a Winchester rifle made in 1866, and asked Heston to give his trademark rallying cry one final time.
Heston did, and then he lowered the rifle and said, "It's been a wonderful run. I cherish it."
Before he was led offstage, his wife, Lydia, spoke in what appeared to be an unscripted, heartfelt departure from the program.
She said how at first she worried about her husband's taking on duties at the NRA, and that she thought it would ruin their lives. But then as she got to know more people from the NRA, she got to like them better.
"I discovered that certain members of the group were very lovable," she said.
And then she finally thanked the group for helping her husband survive.
"It's kept him alive," she said. "And it really means the world to us."
Heston bent down and kissed her. And they were led offstage. Someone else had to carry the rifle. Heston stopped when he got to the edge of the curtain. He turned and waved, and then he was gone.
By Frank Cerabino, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2003
ORLANDO -- The National Rifle Association bid a loving farewell to actor Charlton Heston, who took the stage Saturday for the final time at the group's annual convention, and managed to briefly hold a rifle in the air, and muster up one more, "From my cold, dead hands!"
The homage to Heston put a surreal layer on this annual event, which brings together 50,000 gun owners -- nearly all of them white, and most of them ardent Republicans -- for a weekend of gadget shopping, networking and competing in everything from duck-calling championships to seats on the governing board.
Country singer Toby Keith sang Friday night. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush spoke Saturday night. There was even an NRA-sanctioned comedian, Bill Engvall, who quickly got the crowd on his side by saying what he thought of Natalie Maynes and Rosie O'Donnell for criticizing President George W. Bush.
"If you don't like the way this country runs, and you don't love who's running it, move," Engvall said.
The crowd roared its approval.
Yes, this was the scene of a constant, yet odd, profession of patriotism and constitutional freedom. It was a not-so-well regulated militia kind of patriotism, a flag-draped cadre of self-anointed freedom fighters who stand ready to protect America from anybody they don't like -- maybe even you -- with weapons nobody's got any business knowing about, regulating, or making safer.
No 'foreign media' allowed
In the spirit of comical paranoia that ran deep here, no "foreign media" were allowed to cover the event. And the group's executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, who refers to the NRA as "Freedom's Second Army," unveiled the NRA's own homeland security Web site.
This site, at first, would be available only to NRA members and would give them more information on national security threats than they might get from the government.
"We don't have to be idle civilians waiting for the government to make us feel safer," LaPierre said as he unveiled NRAsafe.com
"Our members, more and more, are looking for us to provide news," he said.
And who are these members? There are 4 million of them, according to the organization.
"I come from a college town that is 90 percent anti-gun, so it's good to come here and feel I'm among like-minded individuals," said Ned Lamb, 55, of Hubbardsville, N.Y. "It's been hard in America to stand up for what you believe in."
Lamb thinks individuals, not government, should take the ultimate responsibility for their safety. And gun control makes that tougher.
"When those people on Flight 93 in Pennsylvania took on those terrorists, that's what the NRA is all about," he said.
So I moved on, where Mitchell Plyler, 14, from McConnells, S.C., was holding a pistol and firing laser shots at a target.
His mother, Marsha, walked up.
"Would you mind if your son owned a gun?" I asked her.
"He's already got three or four," she said. "He's been shooting since he was 8."
Marsha Plyler is a seventh-grade math teacher. I asked her whether she was concerned with children carrying guns to school.
"I used to carry one in my glove compartment," she said. "But I can't anymore, because I'd get fired."
The NRA convention is a good place to feel tough. You can hold thousands of guns in your hands and pull the trigger. The constant soundtrack of the exhibit hall is the metal-on-metal clicking of triggers being pulled.
And you can buy all sorts of macho bumper stickers for your car, such as "Warning! Driver only carries $20 worth of ammunition," "Don't Bother Me... I'm Reloading," and the timely "President Bush, Way to Go. Kick their Ass and Take their Gas."
You can go to the interactive training displays, where helpful salesmen will show your children how to kill bears, elk and deer. Lessons are taught with laser gun simulators that display the circulatory system of the animals.
"Find the heart," salesman Dan Atkinson said. "To drop the animal you need to get maximum blood loss."
No, this was no place for the Bambi bunch. On one wall, the mounted heads of 16 whitetail bucks were roped off. These animals have impressive sets of antlers, and hunters lined up to gawk.
Not far away, a South African named Kobus Prinsloo was offering to take hunters on a $4,500 safari in which he promised them a kudu, a wildebeest, a red hartebeest, a warthog, and two impalas.
"You take the trophy and we take the meat," he said. "Next week, I'm going for elephants."
For relief, I headed to the game-calling competition, where competitors were graded on their calls of seven varieties of game. I got there for the professional competition among coyote callers. The mood was golf quiet. No applause between competitors. And they were introduced by number, not name.
I tracked down Doug Benefield of Georgia, the star of his own hunting show, Turkey Tales, right after his coyote routine, which includes squawking into a plastic caller and using an empty plastic cup to imitate a panting dog.
"What I was doing was trying to simulate a hunting situation with an alpha male getting a cottontail," he said. "The dog is just something a little extra I threw in."
Another competitor, Brad Harris of Neosho, Mo., does his routine with a large green balloon stuck between his knees. At the end of the routine, he punctures the balloon.
"What was the balloon for?" I asked.
"That was the gun going off," he said. "I did it to add realism."
There were gun activists of every stripe here.
One of the more entertaining guys was Jim Dunham, who goes by the name Kid Reo, and walked around dressed like a 19th-century cowboy, putting on exhibitions of his gun-handling skills.
Dunham belongs to an organization called the Single Action Shooting Society, whose members gather in their get-ups to do something called cowboy action shooting.
"We're not reenactors dressed in cowboy clothes shooting paintballs at each other," he said.
These guys fire real bullets at targets while perched on stagecoaches, or after pretending to walk into a saloon and catching a card cheat.
"Most of us who got involved in this sport fell in love with cowboys and Indians in the movies," he said.
Dunham tried to drum up some interest in his particular fascination with guns.
"It's very family friendly," he told a group after an exhibition. "Women are thrilled to be able to put on costumes and go out and shoot their guns."
Not far from where Kid Reo was trying to recruit people who wanted to dress like cowboys, I met Janet Hansen, the chief executive officer of the Varmint Hunters Association, which puts out a magazine called The Varmint Hunter.
This is an association for people who go out and shoot prairie dogs, skunks, raccoons, woodchucks, and a variety of other critters not suitable for mounting.
"There's no season on varmint hunting," Hansen said, ticking off one of the benefits. "It's not unusual to shoot about 350 rounds a day."
I wondered aloud whether animal rights organizations ever got in the way of varmint hunters who needed to kill that many animals.
"I live in South Dakota," Hansen said. "There might be animal rights people in South Dakota, but they keep quiet."
Few black members
It took me a few hours at the convention before I realized that, of the thousands of members I had seen there, I couldn't recall any being black. So I asked at the NRA press office about black membership, and was told the association doesn't measure the racial or ethnic breakdown of its members.
On my second day at the convention, I spotted a black woman, Lage Jonsson, on the convention floor.
"I'm not a member," she said.
"Are there any black members here?" I asked.
"There's one on Aisle 11," she said.
So I went to Aisle 11, where Max Williamson was one of the salesmen for bio-Secure, a company based in Boca Raton that sells bulletproof doors and access-control devices that recognize fingerprints.
Williamson is black and an NRA member.
"How many black people are NRA members?" I asked.
"About point oh, oh, 1 percent," he said, then laughed.
"Why?"
"We don't see the possibilities of being involved," he said. "But I'm a businessman and money only comes in one color: green."
Another group of people hard to find at the NRA convention were the Million Mom March protesters. You'd think with a name like that, they'd be easy to spot.
But there were only about 35 of them, and they were assigned a protest spot that was about a quarter-mile away from the NRA entrance. The moms were actually protesting the NRA in front of the site of the American Telemedicine Association convention.
As I spoke with Mary Leigh Blek, the national director of the moms, she kept talking about the NRA and pointing to the building in front of where police made them stand.
"The NRA's not here. They're way over there," I said, pointing way beyond where we both could see.
"Oh," she said.
Blek, who says she's a lifelong Republican, wants the world to know that the NRA doesn't speak for her or her party.
"We are a problem-solving nation," she said. "And unfortunately, we have let gun policy be dictated by the NRA."
Blek became a gun-control activist after her 21-year-old son was shot and killed during a robbery nine years ago. She says sensible gun control would keep more guns out of the hands of children and criminals.
"It's not about the Second Amendment," she said. "We don't want to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. We're just trying to protect everyone's rights to life."
The Florida branch of the group sent a letter to Jeb Bush to protest his decision to speak at the NRA convention while refusing to meet with the gun-control group.
"While we understand that, as governor, you have a rule in welcoming visitors to our state, we don't understand why this would take precedence over a meeting with mothers who have lost children to gun violence," the letter said.
Bush went beyond giving a welcome to the NRA convention. He gave the keynote address at the members banquet Saturday night, and was listed as "an unflinching defender of personal freedom and Second Amendment rights."
The governor, like his brother, is counted as a reliable friend of the NRA, which lavishes sympathetic candidates with campaign cash.
The NRA Political Victory Fund claimed that 21 of the 25 U.S. Senate candidates it supported last year won their races, and 232 of the 242 NRA-supported House candidates won their races. And that in state and local-level races, 82 percent of the association's candidates came out winners.
Jeb stays in good graces
Jeb Bush spoke very much like a grateful recipient -- past and future -- of the NRA's good graces.
The governor credited the NRA with helping his brother, President Bush, win the 2000 presidential election.
"Were it not for your active involvement, it's safe to say my brother may not have been president of the United States," Bush said.
By the time Bush spoke, Heston was long gone, back to California.
Heston announced last year that he had become stricken with Alzheimer's disease, and the progression of that disease kept him from spending much time at this event, which marked the end of his five-year tenure as the group's most beloved president.
The NRA was determined to see him out as a real-life Moses, a role he played in the movies.
Heston's cowboy silhouette, rifle on his shoulder, was the official logo for the convention. And Friday night's tribute to him was a separate-ticket event, attended by about 7,000 members, and one bald eagle, which swooped over the crowd as the national anthem played.
LaPierre unveiled a larger-than-life bronze statue of Heston dressed in his gun-toting role as Will Penny, in the movie of the same name. And the audience was treated to a 38-minute video of Heston's efforts to protect gun rights.
The NRA store at the convention featured numerous Heston-themed items, everything from Heston shot glasses ($5) to a folding knife with Heston's signature inscribed on it ($80). And if buying Heston's book The Courage to Be Brave wasn't enough, you could also buy 100 minutes of excerpts from 28 of his speeches, all compiled on a tape titled Patriot at the Podium.
Heston, 78, would spend only a brief moment at the podium this weekend.
In his two appearances, he ambled slowly on stage, and spoke to the convention through videotaped messages recorded earlier. He made no mention of his illness on the tape, talking only about the group's accomplishments and his desire to see the fight for gun rights continue.
"You do the work of warriors," he said on the taped message. "A summer soldier and sunshine patriot will shrink from battle. You must not."
The NRA also pre-taped Heston handing over the gavel to the man who follows him, Kayne Robinson, an NRA vice president and former chairman of the Republican Party in Iowa.
Heston was on stage with the board only for the first few minutes of Saturday's meeting, and he didn't actually speak to the audience until LaPierre presented him with a final gift, a Winchester rifle made in 1866, and asked Heston to give his trademark rallying cry one final time.
Heston did, and then he lowered the rifle and said, "It's been a wonderful run. I cherish it."
Before he was led offstage, his wife, Lydia, spoke in what appeared to be an unscripted, heartfelt departure from the program.
She said how at first she worried about her husband's taking on duties at the NRA, and that she thought it would ruin their lives. But then as she got to know more people from the NRA, she got to like them better.
"I discovered that certain members of the group were very lovable," she said.
And then she finally thanked the group for helping her husband survive.
"It's kept him alive," she said. "And it really means the world to us."
Heston bent down and kissed her. And they were led offstage. Someone else had to carry the rifle. Heston stopped when he got to the edge of the curtain. He turned and waved, and then he was gone.
