Despite starring in one of the less-woke shows produced in Hollywood, Kevin Costner still has his liberal bona fides intact.
The closest he’s ever come to outright supporting a Republican, for instance, is halfheartedly campaigning for Liz Cheney in 2022 — who was, at that point, as close to a Democrat as you could be while still having an R after your name.
However, conservatives have a soft spot for the guy, and not just because of his work on the TV show “Yellowstone” from 2018 until 2023. If you want to know why, listen to the man talk about his experience with hunting and firearms when he received the T. Boone Pickens Lifetime Sportsman Award last year in Dallas, where he talked about “what it must be like to hunt in world-class ground.”
“We will never be able to explain to a cynical world the early mornings, the stops at the Waffle House — that they’re as much a part of the day as the hunt itself. That our gear, dirty and worn, is priceless,” he told the crowd as he accepted the honor.
“It’s comforting, and will hang on the wall long after we’re able to walk the fields. Long after we’re gone, our guns will pass lovingly into the hands of our sons and daughters — and when they bring it to their shoulders and they press it to their cheek, against its worn stock, they’ll feel us and they’ll know the freedom that the outdoors provided.”
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Costner went on to recount how his grandmother had given him his first gun when he was 5 years old. Yes, 5. Nowadays, they’d be calling child services on her. But she was bred of a different stock.
As Costner recounted, she married at 14 and lived in Oklahoma with her husband.
“They lost everything in the Dust Bowl when the banks closed their doors,” Costner said.
“But before that gun could pass into my hands, my mother had it in hers, and she said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Costner recounted. “It was a standoff between two strong women — enough to break up my birthday party with me looking 3 feet below, looking up.
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“But my grandmother, not wanting it to go any farther — she took the gun back from my mom and she held it up and she simply said, in her Oklahoma twang that if he misuses it, you can take it from him. My mother agreed without a word, and my grandmother bent down and handed it to me.”
His second gun, Costner said, wasn’t really his, but his father’s. And he took it to school — not for untoward purposes, but because he loved it so much.
“I remember taking it to sharing day in kindergarten,” Costner said. “I carried it to school — nobody walked kids to school back then. I just drug it through the neighborhood.
“All I know is that I was told to bring our favorite thing, and that’s what I did.
“I remember being sent home with a note pinned on my shirt — I didn’t know how to read — but came to know that if my parents wanted the gun back, they would have to come and get it themselves,” he said.
Needless to say, Costner “never saw that gun again until much later in my life.” However, there were many other guns in his life, including a pellet gun that taught him proper aim.
“You learn a lot when you only get one shot and you’re hunting on someone else’s property,” he said jokingly.
The entire speech is worth listening to, although the relevant portion starts at about four minutes into it:
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Yes, Costner was a kid who was a bit of a troublemaker. But he learned from an early age to respect firearms — both the dangers they could cause if used incautiously, and the responsibility and self-reliance they teach a person if used responsibly.
The left is allergic to guns and the Second Amendment. They don’t believe guns can be used to teach life lessons, much less to defend oneself or to hunt the bounty God has given us on this earth. Guns are scary metal death machines that need to be done away with at all costs.
Costner isn’t William F. Buckley or Ronald Reagan, politically — but to hear him talk like this, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference in ideology. This is a man who understands personal responsibility, natural stewardship and God-given rights. With Hollywood being the intellectual wasteland that it is, thank heavens for small mercies like this dose of common sense.
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