A short synopsis of Heston's appearance in Bowling for Columbine:

As startled and grateful as he is at this moment, there's no question that Moore has an agenda. He's never pretended to be objective, but instead sees his filmmaking and tv work as a kind of pop-cultural agitprop. He pursues his subjects -- GM's Roger Smith, Nike's Phil Knight, and here, NRA president and voluble spokesperson Charlton Heston -- with a relentlessness that is sometimes funny, sometimes grating, and always disquieting for someone (usually the subject). Here, Moore finally talks his way into Heston's L.A. gates, whereupon he asks him pointedly about his NRA speechmaking (in the wake of Columbine and again, during a rally in Flint just after the shooting of 6-year-old citizen Kayla Rolland by another first-grader). Heston insists he didn't know about Kayla's murder, and refuses to apologize.

Moore pushes on, pressing Heston to come up with possible reasons for the States' inordinate rates of gun violence, Heston hems and haws, suggests "historical" proclivities (until Moore points out that Germany and Japan have violent histories and remarkably low gun violence stats), then finally blurts that it must be bound up in American "mixed ethnicity." Moore doesn't wait, but repeats the phrase back to Heston, who blanches when he hears his own words come back at him. He cuts off the interview and shambles off, his back retreating from the camera as Moore asks him to look at little Kayla's photo.

Certainly, Heston, virulent and nonsensical, is an easy target, and hardly worth the amount of time that Bowling for Columbine spends on him. But his slip speaks to the slippery workings, unconscious or hyperconscious, of U.S. culture, politics, and morality, an inexorable campaign of fear and consumption.