The National Rifle Association wasted no time firing back at state Rep. Leon Stavrinakis, who wants potentially violent mentally ill people added to a national database so they can’t buy guns.
Shortly after the Charleston lawmaker announced his plan to introduce legislation to that effect at Ashley Hall, the private school that was the scene of an attempted shooting earlier this month, a former NRA official released his own statement.
“As usual, liberal lawmakers don’t know when to quit, and now they are even beating up on their own constituency,” actor and gun-rights activist Charlton Heston said in a posthumous statement. “Mentally ill people and other crazies have the God-given right to defend themselves from their attackers, even if those attackers exist only in their heads.”
Heston, best known for breaking the Ten Commandments (literally) and outsmarting a planet full of apes (all of them, presumably, with a hair gel fetish), says that attempting to take guns from anyone is an abomination against God and the Constitution, which was written before the first school shooting, and maybe even before there were multiplexes for crazy people to shoot up. The respected actor and longtime NRA poobah repeated the mantra that guns don’t kill people, people kill people who don’t have guns.
Stavrinakis denied charges that his attempt to literally interject a little sanity into the gun-buying process is a slippery slope that leads to jack-booted thugs coming into your home to confiscate harmless AK-47s and Uzis.
“I think Mr. Heston is brain-dead,” Stavrinakis said.
Technically, Stavrinakis is correct, as Heston passed away nearly five years ago. But conservatives say the film star is still an important voice in our national debate and should continue to chime in, even though he is deceased. Which is funny, since conservatives believe the opinion of any other living celebrity should be suppressed, unless he is Clint Eastwood.
Heston says that he will continue to stand up for the rights of gun owners, even from beyond the grave.
“All that stuff I said about how you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands?” Heston said. “I didn’t mean it. You still can’t have it.”
OK, before you freak out, this is satire. But this isn’t. This is what you lose when crazy people get their hands on a gun: