Word: nra
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...safety course in Nevada in order to get my multistate concealed weapons permit. The instructional component is basically a PowerPoint presentation illustrated with graphic pictures and a video of what can happen to you and your flesh if you mishandle a firearm - something like An Inconvenient Truth for the NRA crowd. What really caught my attention, though, was an off-the-curriculum discussion about when I should use the weapon I would have the right to carry. "Bare fear doesn't justify self-defense," the instructor told me. "Only reasonable fear." This man, a gun dealer whose whole Weltanschauung seemed...
...marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and after Robert Kennedy's death, he called for gun control. But like many young liberals, he aged into conservatism. In the '80s he became a prime spokesman for right-wing causes and in 1998 the president of the National Rifle Association (NRA). At the 2000 NRA convention, he invoked his own Moses, hoisting a rifle above his head and proclaiming that presidential candidate Al Gore could remove the gun only by prying it "from my cold, dead hands...
...question, he came up with a great one. in 1998 Heston, who had long since renounced his gun-control stance, became president of the NRA. Two years later, addressing an NRA convention, he mimicked Moses? gesture at the Red Sea by holding above his head one of the 400 firearms he owned - a handmade Brooks flintlock rifle - and proclaiming that the Democratic Presidential candidate could remove that gun only by prying it "from my cold, dead hands." It was as if Al Gore was Messala, or the Ape King, or the Omega man's marauders, or a band of Comanches...
Heston remained NRA President until 2003, when he resigned in acknowledgment of Alzheimer's ravages. That year, the Association erected, in front of its D.C. headquarters, a 10-ft. bronze likeness of Heston as the cowboy Will Penny, brandishing a handgun. The man who seemed like sculpture on screen had become a statue in honor of his favorite cause...
...Romney played in nearly every early straw poll, and pandered to each conservative demographic. He joined the NRA. He talked tough on illegal immigrants, and became a crusader against gay marriage. "Strength" was his watchword. With an impressive gallery of high-profile endorsements, he was the only Republican candidate who seemed to be on the right side of nearly every issue for the plurality of the old GOP coalition...