The late actor Charlton Heston was scheduled to be honored with an official stamp to be issued later this year by the U.S. Postal Service, as a part of its “Legends of Hollywood” series, according to StampNewsNow. However, it now appears that it’s not quite the done deal it once was. Why? Possibly due to Heston’s association as past president of the National Rifle Association.

Although the left has stayed pretty quiet on the stamp itself, previous comments about the legendary actor have begun to resurface, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which noted:

In the movie Bowling for Columbine, for example, Michael Moore implied that Heston was complicit in a high school massacre because of his advocacy against gun control. More recently, Jim Carrey crooned in a Funny or Die video that because Heston was pro-gun “his immortal soul may lay forever in the sand; the angels wouldn’t take him up to Heaven like he planned.”

Carrey’s “Cold Dead Hands” video referred to a highlight of Heston’s five-year tenure as the National Rifle Association’s president — his famous “cold, dead hands” speech at the organization’s 2000 annual meeting in Charlotte, N.C. It was both beautiful and emboldening, much like the Second Amendment itself, and was directed at then-presidential candidate Al Gore.

When Gore and his opponent, George W. Bush, were asked in an earlier debate whether they supported the Brady gun control bill, Bush said, “Law-abiding citizens ought to be allowed to protect their families.”

Gore talked about hunters, sportsmen and long guns — not handguns, the weapon of choice for self-defending Americans everywhere.

“All my proposals are focused on that problem: gun safety,” he said. “None of my proposals would have any effect on hunters or sportsmen or people who use rifles.”

Garbage collector’s patriotic gesture brings resident to tears

Heston made gun control — and Gore’s embrace of it– the subject of his address at that year’s meeting.

“When freedom shivers in the cold shadow of true peril, it’s always the patriots who first hear the call,” he said in his famous baritone voice. “When loss of liberty is looming as it is now, the siren sounds first in the hearts of freedom’s vanguard.”

He offered eloquent examples of “Concord bridges and Pearl Harbors” when the call to action was answered by patriots armed with “wooden stock and blued steel,” before finally hoisting his custom-made flintlock rifle above his head and thundering:

“Mr. Gore! From my cold dead hands!”

Those words were greeted with thunderous applause.

Heaton will be sorely missed as an actor. He’ll be missed even more as a patriot and defender of the Second Amendment.

The “Heston forever stamp” was scheduled for release in April, according to StampNewsNow.com, and is illustrated to the right.

Watch his remarks at the NRA meeting below.

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