We had forgotten this part of the Charlton Heston biography:

Heston aroused great anger from the political left. Filmmaker Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning “Bowling for Columbine” (2002) tried to portray Heston as callous toward shooting victims. But Moore’s treatment of the visibly frail actor and what some reviewers contended were flawed facts might have backfired.

Al Gore told the New Yorker magazine: “I really appreciate what [Moore was] trying to do, but I wouldn’t have thought before seeing the movie that anyone could have aroused any sympathy in me for Charlton Heston. And yet he did.”

Better yet, we like how Stephen Hunter put it in today’s Washington Post:

Pilloried and parodied, lampooned and bullied, he never relented, he never backed down, and in time it came to seem less an old star’s trick of vanity than an act of political heroism. He endured, like Moses. He aged, like Moses. And the stone tablet he carried had only one commandment: Thou shalt be armed. It can even be said that if the Supreme Court in June finds a meaning in the Second Amendment consistent with NRA policy, that he will have died just short of the Promised Land — like Moses.