Excellent article on Dr. Rice, and some thoughts on Charlton Heston
The London Times (via The Anchoress), Condi: The girl who cracked the ice,

With the bombings came marauding groups of armed white vigilantes called “nightriders” who drove through black neighbourhoods shooting and starting fires. John Rice and his neighbours guarded the streets at night with shotguns.

The memory of her father out on patrol lies behind Rice’s opposition to gun control today. Had those guns been registered, she argues, Bull Connor would have had a legal right to take them away, thereby removing one of the black community’s only means of defence. “I have a sort of pure second amendment view of the right to bear arms,” she said in 2001.

The article is most interesting, and these 2 paragraphs brought to mind another thought:

When I was eighteen I drove my mother to the funeral of a child who was accidentally shot and killed by his 5-yr old brother, and I'm very gun-adverse. However, I respect the Constitution, and respect the individual's responsibility to exert his/her right. Therefore, one of the reasons I don't respect Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine is that he completely ignores the role of the Second Amendment in the struggle for Civil Rights in the South. Moore also makes Charlton Heston, who was already in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, look like an evil clown (to put it mildly) (more details on Heston and Bowling for Columbine here). Charlton Heston was directly involved in the Civil Rights Movement at the height of his success. He had won the 1960 Oscar for Best Actor, and by all accounts was an A-list actor in 1963 when he joined the March on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered his famous I have a dream speech. Heston's involvement with the NRA was not coincidental to his civil rights activism.