The Children of Moses

Every time I see the face of Charlton Heston and hear his theatrical, B-movie stentoria on behalf of guns, I wince. In my mind’s eye, I can see another child falling.

The man’s an actor, and not a very good one at that, but the role he’s currently playing as president of the National Rifle Association is inherently dangerous because of its quasi-religious appeal.

To those on the borderline of rational thought, he is still Moses, an image that has somehow stuck with him all these years, transcending celluloid fakery to become the persona of a guy who does nothing to discourage it.

Challenging that image or mocking the actor who embodies it would be an immense waste of time except when the actor thrusts it upon us as the figurehead of an organization with questionable instincts.

I am reasonably certain that as Moses, Heston will lead the NRA to great heights of achievement and acceptance. That’s the basic job of a celebrity who hires on to sell either soap, soup, shampoo . . . or guns.

However, Heston’s history is not without flashes of conscience, and I wondered as I watched a new video recently about kids and guns if, as he’s up there posturing on behalf of firearms, he ever thinks about the children killed by the weapons he’s promoting.

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Guns kill about 5,000 kids each year, and the video, “Path of a Bullet,” attempts to show in bloody detail how they die.

It begins with the voice-over imagery of young boys running through an alley, followed by the blast of gunfire, a scream and then the sound of a beating heart that finally slows and stops.

That’s the Hollywoodian part of an otherwise very real presentation, because the action then cuts to a trauma ward as blood drips from the body of a young man whose heart and lungs have been torn open by a bullet.

He is no actor or stuntman, a narrator tells us as a camera pans his mutilated body, but a kid hit by a small missile traveling 800 miles an hour.

“Fifteen minutes earlier,” the voice says, “he was alive, happy and healthy.”

We see other real young victims of gun violence and no effort is made to shield us from the painful, bloody realities of those “very small bullets” hurtling into soft flesh.

One victim has his hand and part of his face shot away. Another has his spinal cord severed.

“Path of a Bullet” is the idea of Dr. Douglas McConnell, a thoracic surgeon at Long Beach Medical Center who sees up close what a bullet can do. Produced by the hospital and the Long Beach Unified School District, its audience will be largely schoolchildren who, it is hoped, will carry the message of gunfire’s pain and finality through their entire lives.

Best it should also be shown to those for whom guns are scepters and Moses is, well, God.

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The purpose of the video is to educate. “We need to teach the consequence of pulling a trigger,” McConnell said in a telephone interview. “Most kids think of guns in terms of ‘clean violence,’ because that’s what they see in the movies. No one gets hurt. No one dies.”

He sees shifting values among the young as at least one of the root causes of violence. “We once looked up to kids who had cars. Now gun ownership is the sign of a really cool dude.”

While reluctant to politicize his video, the 52-year-old surgeon remembers that in his own youth in Van Nuys among guys who cruised the boulevard, there were gangs, turf and colors. “We had fights,” he says, “but the difference was there were no guns.”

Violence witnessed real and up close is far different than its Hollywood depictions. There is a sound to pain and a smell to death that no one who experiences them can easily, if ever, forget.

Time as a Marine at war and then as a journalist have brought me close, too close, to what guns can do. Those years have fashioned me into the guy who cringes at the naivete of an actor who sells gun ownership.

I keep wanting to shout at the television screen, “What about the kids, Moses? What about the small bodies lying in a schoolyard? What about young lives ended too soon in such terrible pain?”

I drove recently through Springfield, Oregon, where a 15-year-old allegedly murdered his parents and two schoolmates and wounded 22 others. “It’s different than it was,” a town person said to me. “It’s a sad place now.”

I wonder as I listen to Moses thundering from his mountaintop of ignorance how much more sadness will result from the products he so enthusiastically endorses.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com