From your warm, living hands

Defender of civil liberties and the Constitution Charlton Heston, your and my favorite senile NRA executive, is giving you, red-blooded American, the chance to win his "my cold dead hands" rifle.

No, seriously. Best of all, you don't actually have to join the NRA or want anything to do with it to enter the contest.

Consider the possibilities: this is the weapon that, according to the NRA, "unleashed a revolution, rallying law-abiding gunowners, changing the course of elections and defeating the Clinton-Gore anti-gun machine."

Meditate on that a bit. This gun "unleashed a revolution." OK, fair enough. Many a revolution (like all political power, to paraphrase Chairman Mao) has come from the barrel of a gun. But it seems to me that at the moment you take up arms in revolt, you cease to be a "law-abiding" citizen. Or so it would seem. More frightening still is the notion that Chucky's Winchester deserves credit for "changing the course of elections." Now, maybe I'm just one of these naïve, hippie gun grabbers who doesn't know any better, but it seems to me that raising a rifle to alter the course of an election would be in direct violation of most folks' conception of democracy.

Call me crazy, but this isn't the sort of thing of which a man of such principle as the illustrious Moses would want to boast. Particularly a man who, in his self-promotion, trumpets having "stood beside Dr. King" during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. To quote my roommate, "it's too bad he wasn't standing beside King on that balcony in Memphis."

Regardless of Heston's dementia, I do think it'd be really terrific if a sane person won the rifle just to stick it to the NRA. Personally, if I win, I'd love to turn this into a great publicity coup for the good folks at the Brady Center. It'd be beautiful to have a proud member of the NRA Blacklist in possession of such a cherished treasure of the NRA and donating it to the group's archnemesis so that it could be melted down into something nonviolent.