HCI Criticizes Col. Jeff Cooper - Yak Alert

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deanf

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http://handguncontrol.org/press/release.asp?Record=23

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>HESTON SUGGESTS "LYNCHING" AS APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO AL GORE'S GUN POLICY

"Now, [Al Gore is] saying 'I'm with you guys on guns.' In any other time or place you'd be looking for a lynching mob." The crowd responded with "let's do it" and "I've got a rope."
-- The Grand Rapids Press, October 17, 2000 quoting NRA president Charlton Heston and describing audience reaction.

Washington, DC - Handgun Control released a new report today, "The Gun Lobby and Race: Thinly-Veiled Bigotry," revealing the extremist message of the gun lobby. The report shows a clear pattern of appealing to violence, racism and bigotry through National Rifle Association (NRA) official speeches and literature. Just this week NRA president Charlton Heston used words tinged with racist overtones. Despite often bragging of his presence at the 1963 March on Washington with Martin Luther King, thinly veiled hateful and racist arguments have been a staple of his public appearances for several years. In a 1997 speech titled "Fighting the Culture War in America," Heston provided some insight into the NRA's apparent message:


Mainstream America is counting on you to draw your sword and fight for them. These people have precious little time to and resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it is a divine duty for woman to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other...
Heston's words were even quoted on former Ku Klux Klan Wizard David Duke's website.

In response to Heston's statements Sarah Brady said, "Mr. Heston's incendiary remarks, tantamount to calling for the lynching of a sitting Vice President of the United States, are incredibly frightening and dangerous. Heston speaks a language of violence and hate. Do the leaders of the NRA feel they need a message riddled with hate to accomplish their extremist legislative agenda? When the gun lobby ties racism and hatred to their political and legislative agenda, America loses. My husband was seriously wounded in an attack on President Ronald Reagan. Incendiary words often have violent results. I call on George W. Bush to denounce the violent and abhorrent language of his supporters directed against the Vice President of the United States."

James Jay Baker, the NRA's top lobbyist, has publicly said that Governor George W. Bush has never denied the NRA any of its agenda. Bush has eased restrictions on carrying handguns while presiding over lax enforcement of gun laws and tolerating armed felons. Bush heeded an NRA call to allow handguns inside places of worship, hospitals and nursing homes. And Texas ranks number one in the country for gun shows, providing criminals with easy access to guns. In the words of Nina Butts of Texans Against Gun Violence, "What the NRA wants, Bush gives. What the NRA doesn't want, he defeats."

Paul Blackman, NRA director of research, has written that inner-city violence, which kills predominantly young black males, is good for society. In his 1994 paper, The Federal Factoid Factory on Firearms and Violence: A Review of CDC Research and Politics, Blackman dismisses public health researchers who have decried the $20-billion-a-year medical costs and loss of productivity costs of firearm violence, arguing that since young homicide victims are "frequently criminals themselves and/or drug addicts or users," he argues their deaths offer "net gains" to society.

In a startling statement, Jeff Cooper, NRA board member and columnist for the NRA's flagship publication, the American Rifleman, noted in 1991 "the consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition."

Heston is calling his crusade "a holy war." George W. Bush, according to the NRA's Baker, has been only too eager to answer Heston's call. In the words of NRA vice president Kayne Robinson, "If we win, we'll have a president where we work out of their office."[/quote]



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"Anyone feel like saluting the flag which the strutting ATF and FBI gleefully raised over the smoldering crematorium of Waco, back in April of ‘93?" -Vin Suprynowicz
 
Bunch of lying hipoctites! Spike Lee can urge the murder of Mr Heston and that idiot Bladwin can urge the burning of the homes of the NRA leadership and the HCI keeps its mouth shut.

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"Get yourself a Pistolet Makarova and lose that pricey western gadget."
 
Funny, when I hear the words "lynch mob" or "get a rope", I think of Western movies, horse thieves and Pace Picante Sauce commercials.

I guess those HCI jerks are some real racists if they automatically think of African-Americans every time they hear those words...

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"..but never ever Fear. Fear is for the enemy. Fear and Bullets."
10mm: It's not the size of the Dawg in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog!
 
Yah, and their point is..what? Every public person runs the risk of having words taken out of context, or honest observations going against the P.C. police.
 
Cooper is right, 90% of the people killed in the inner-cities are no great loss---BECAUSE THEY ARE CRIMINAL SCUMBAGS KILLING EACH OTHER!!! Why does race even enter into it? I hate race baiting political crap.

Larry Correia

And notice that my last name has double R's and 4 vowels before anybody accuses me of being racially insensitive.
 
Yet another case re-enforcing my conclusion that if someone insults you, THEY are the appropriate subject of the insult.

HCI calls me (or any other NRA member) a bigot? Aren't THEY the ones that want to jail me and kill my family just because I own a gun?
 
Hey, I was there. "The crowd responded,..."? IT WAS JUST ONE PERSON! And it was a joke. (At least it sounded like a joke to me.) I guess you stuff a few thousand people into a room, and they're all guilty of anything any of them might say in jest.

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Sic semper tyrannis!
 
This is the third time I've tried to respond.
No, the fourth - the other times I got too agitated before I finished.

Cooper may be an NRA director, I don't remember. But he is only one of many directors.

But when the President of the NRA Charleton Heston publically suggests lynching a sitting Vice-President of the country and Presidential candidate less than three weeks before the election, that damages the cause he is supposed to be promoting.

HCI lost no time getting quotes up on their web site.

Someone should gag Heston til after the election, after which his resignation should be demanded on the spot.

Heston has a right to personal opinions, as do I, but should have better sense than to state them as a spokesman for the NRA.

If you are wondering, I have been an NRA Endowment member for somewhere around twenty-five years, so I do indeed have a stake in this debacle.
 
Rusty S.: To repeat, I was there. HE. DID. NOT. SUGGEST. A. LYNCHING. It was a joke. In context it was obviously a joke. It was taken by the crowd as a joke. We laughed. Somebody shouted out that they had a rope. We laughed some more.

I realize that the media will take anything we say out of context, and attack us with it. That's a given. But we should we then censor ourselves, so that we NEVER say ANYTHING which could be deliberately taken out of context and misrepresented? That's not even humanly possible, let alone desirable.

I've got my reasons for not liking Heston, but this could scarcely be one of them.

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Sic semper tyrannis!
 
If Heston said that stuff in the paragraph:

"Mainstream ..." he is one idiot. Things like this cause the RKBA to lose the middle.

Most folks given the choice of gun rights + bigots or weakened gun rights (maybe no gun rights) and no bigots, would choose the latter. Sorry to tell the truth on this.

Cooper says these kind of things for years.

I get flamed for this but the tie between the RKBA and such bigotry is one of our biggest weaknesses.

In a war, you can't make stupid mistakes just trying to be funny.
 
Here is what Heston said as reported by the Muskegon Chronicle:

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>"To have the vice president say he is in favor of gun rights, that really annoys me," said Heston, 77, who is backing Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the presidential election.

"I grew up in Michigan on the Au Sable River. I learned to be an American in a one-room schoolhouse. That is why it irritates me to see Gore come here telling us what he knows about guns and unions," Heston told the packed auditorium, which filled with boos and hissing at the sound of Gore's name.

Heston scoffed at Gore's claiming a union song was a childhood lullaby when it wasn't written until he was 27. "Now, he's saying I'm with you guys on guns," Heston said.

"In any other time or place you'd be looking for a lynching mob," Heston added, drawing enthusiastic shouts from the audience of "let's do it" and "I've got a rope."[/quote]

As for Heston, I don't think him or Cooper said anything that was out of line. Look at it this way, with Gore purposely muting his record on guns so he can try and win - who is going to lose more by giving the NRA press time?

Why do you think the press has completely ignored these charges by HCI when any other time they would be glad to orchestrate a little 4th estate lynching of Heston themselves?

They are ignoring it because they realize that focusing on the differences in gun control between Bush and Gore (or letting the NRA get press time to explain its comments) might well be fatal to Gore in the swing states he needs to win.

They might also be ignoring it because it its a piece of shoddy propaganda that even the Nazis would be ashamed to claim but that's another issue.

Only HCI would even TRY and paint a former civil-rights marcher as a racist though.
 
Most police officers I know (and I've been out drinking with a bunch of friends many times where I was the only one without a badge) refer to the vast majority of shootings they've responded to as "NHI incidents"; No Humans Involved.

This is remarkably consistant from the lily-white environs of Forsyth County to the housing projects on Bankhead Highway. The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of shootings are between people conducting some manner of criminal business, regardless of the race of the shooter or shootee.

This, however, is a rather unpopular and non-PC fact these days.

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"..but never ever Fear. Fear is for the enemy. Fear and Bullets."
10mm: It's not the size of the Dawg in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog!
 
Chicago did a study of all murders committed in that fair city during a 20 year stretch. Over 3/4 were committed by persons with prior criminal records, but 2/3 of the "victims" were themselves convicted criminals, putting the majority of murders into the "good riddance" category. (Other, distinctly non-PC results related to demographics mean the study has been carefully ignored.)

Maybe Cooper's statement has some basis in fact...
 
It's the same over here in Switzerland. Guns go bang. When? Usually
when folks from the Balkans (Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia) are
involved. Two recent cases - guy shoots woman in a car on a parking in
Albisrieden, near Zurich. He was Albanian, she was an ex-Bosnian (got
a Swiss passport). Dulliken - two dead, five wounded. Both were ethnic
Albanians (one of them had a Swiss passport), both robbers were
convicted of some other crimes and BANNED from owning anything that
shoots. Unfortunately, the victims were no criminals.

And the last three murders (this time, no guns) of three women in
Wohlen, near Zurich are probably related to some prostitution issue
too. All three victims are from the Dominican republic. But the whole
affair stinks - two of them did allegedly not have work permits. My
suspicion? A bill had to be settled.

[This message has been edited by mussi (edited October 24, 2000).]
 
"In any other time or place you'd be looking for a lynching mob," Heston added, drawing enthusiastic shouts from the audience of "let's do it" and "I've got a rope."

One last time: I was there. One person shouted, "Let's do it!". One person, might have been the same person but I'm not sure, shouted, "I've got a rope." Two shouts, so technically they can use the plural, but those shouts represented about 0.05% of the people present, and they were jokes. Every time I attend one of these events, and read the reports, I end up despising the media. Every time.

Oh, and though it was a joke, Heston was right; For much of our country's history, Gore COULD have been lynched for his views on gun control.

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Sic semper tyrannis!
 
Now, wait a minute. Heston made a remark about lynching the Veep. Fine, whether he was joking or not, we all agree that he made it.

So what? I thought the point was to prove that he was a bigot, a racist to be exact? And to do that, all they can think of is to say that he "threatened" to lynch a white Southern politician, which was somehow an anti-black remark because he used the word "lynch?"
Al Gore is WHITE, folks. Occam's razor shreds this.
 
This election is going to be all about voter turnout. It is close enough that both candidates need maximum turnout to win.

HCI may be trying to motivate minority groups that traditionally support the Democrats to get out and vote against the NRA by claiming the racism angle.

Realistically, the whole racisim argument defies logic. They claim that Heston and the NRA are racists but can't seem to explain why Heston was marching with Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963. Nor can they explain the presence of several black civil rights activists within the NRA. Is Karl Malone a racist as well?

This is beyond logic. They are just grabbing at straws to do anything that they think might help Gore get elected.
 
I agree with Bartholomew Roberts.

Anti-gun fanaticism seems to consist of "True Believers", self-ordained to save us from an inanimate tool they evidently believe to harbor a demon which will possess and take over the mind of anyone who so much as touches a handgun.

As they alone have been given the "Truth" and "The Only Way", facts which contradict their beliefs no longer need be listened to.

Not only is this thinking indicative of a cult mentality, it is elitist as it qualifies them to make decisions for us "in your best interests" because we aren't competent to make our own decisions.

It also allows them to twist the facts to fit their beliefs. We firearms ownership proponents can expect them to use flagrant misrepresentations. But we should not hand them an opportunity to wrap their propaganda around the slightest kernel of truth.


[This message has been edited by Rusty S (edited October 25, 2000).]
 
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