Topeka Capital-Journal – 2001

The National Rifle Association whooped it up at its national convention in Kansas City over the weekend. Members all but danced in the aisles as President Charlton Heston told them they saved the American way of life by helping elect George W. Bush, and executive director Wayne LaPierre, who really runs the NRA, declared threats to the nation’s freedom still exist.

The hootin’ and hollerin’ gun owners have reason to party right now, because everything is going their way. Membership may be at an all-time high, even without counting the dead members. There is only one major anti-gun bill in Congress, and it isn’t expected to pass.

Heston was elected to a fourth one-year term as president. He was presented a mint-condition colonial musket by the gunmen’s group, and he spoke for all of them when he held it aloft and said he would give it up only when it is taken “from my cold, dead hands.”

LaPierre and other speakers ripped the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill that would limit political ads by the NRA and similar groups two months before an election, calling it an effort to destroy First Amendment rights to free speech, thus endangering the Second Amendment’s imagined rights to own guns.

All this is so much baloney. Continue reading →