Friday, June 25, 1999
Heston on violence: Hollywood more to blame than guns
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Gun-control advocates tried to turn the congressional debate over gun legislation into a “debate over whether or not the National Rifle Association should be allowed to exist,” NRA President Charlton Heston said in Cincinnati on Thursday.
The Oscar-winning movie actor, a longtime conservative activist who has been the NRA's point man for the past two years, told about 700 delegates to the Young Republican National Federation convention that “liberals and their lackeys in the media tried to make us the issue.”
Mr. Heston's appearance at the Young Republicans convention in Cincinnati came less than a week after the U.S. House rejected gun-control legislation.
The rejection came because many congressional Democrats opposed provisions of the bill backed by the NRA that they said would emasculate the gun-control legislation.
Earlier in the day, Hamilton County Democratic Party officials passed out a letter to the Young Republican convention delegates that it was “unfortunate” that Mr. Heston and the NRA had tried to block “reasonable” gun legislation.
In a press conference before his speech, Mr. Heston argued that the business he's been in for a half-century — the Hollywood film industry — is more responsible for the “climate of violence” that produced the Littleton, Colo., school shootings than guns.
“When I first started out in films, if you were killed, you fell backwards, clutched your chest, and maybe you would see little rivulets of blood coming out between your fingers,” Mr. Heston said. “Then I made a film with (director) Sam Peckin pah, and suddenly, heads were being blown off. Now, it's much, much worse.”
But Hollywood, Mr. Heston said, must be persuaded to police itself, “because there are First Amendment rights.”
At one point in his press conference, Mr. Heston laughed when asked why his character — an American military officer — was killed in the World War II drama Midway.
Mr. Heston explained that he played a fictional character, while other stars such as Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford played historical characters.
“You couldn't kill Admiral Nimitz,” Mr. Heston said. “So they had to kill me.”
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