Excerpt from a speech before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., given in 1997, by Charlton Heston...

I believe every good journalist needs to know why the Second Amendment must be considered more essential than the First Amendment. This may be a bitter pill to swallow, but the right to keep and bear arms is not archaic, it is as essential to liberty today as it was in 1776.

And your efforts to undermine the Second Amendment, to deride it and degrade it, to readily accept diluting it and eagerly promote redefining it, threaten not only the physical well-being of millions of Americans, but also the core concept of individual liberty our founding fathers struggled to perfect and protect.

I simply cannot stand by and watch a right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States come under attack from those who either can't understand it, don't like the sound of it, or find themselves too philosophically squeamish to see why it remains the first among equals: because it is the right we turn to when all else fails.

Please go forth and tell the truth. There can be no free speech, no freedom of the press...for anybody anywhere, without the Second Amendment freedom to fight for it.

All I can say is God Bless Charlton Heston and the United States of America!