Sarah Vowell Guns, Presidents, and Term Paper

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.. [of] her father, a gunsmith, she writes...'All he ever cared about were guns. All I ever cared about was art'" (Martin 2000). Vowell's anti-gun politics and assassination fascination thus may have a personal dimension -- in the act of remembering violent American history, Vowell comes to terms with her past although retains her liberal politics.

Vowell does tie the issues raised by violence and assignations in the past to present-day attitudes Regarding one unwitting casualty in the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life, Reagan's press secretary James Brady who must spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair due to his injury, Vowell is proud that she is part of their campaign and writes how moved she is: "that he and his wife, Sarah, turned this rotten luck into the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is downright heroic. And not the soft-focus treacle that 'heroic' often implies. I'm on their mailing list" (Vowell 84). Unbelievably, she notes, two years after an attempt was made upon his life, Ronald Reagan still addressed the NRA convention. Brady, she points out, is striving to keep guns away from madmen and terrorists, unlike Republicans who clothe themselves in the rhetoric of patriotism combined with the rhetoric of guns.

Yet in her own past prose, Vowell has admitted to the seductive power of guns and the fact they have created a kind of bond between herself and her father. Her father even went so far as to reconstruct the past by making his own historically accurate and active cannon and Vowell went with him to try it out, she writes in the one essay in her collection Take the Cannoli "Dad shoots the cannon again so they can see how it works.

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The other hiker says, 'That's quite a machine you've got there.' But he isn't talking about the cannon. He's talking about my tape recorded and my microphone -- which is called a shotgun mike. I stare back at him, then look over at my father's canon, then down at my microphone, and I think, Oh. My. God. My dad and I are the same person. We're both smart-alecky loners with goofy projects and weird equipment. And since this whole target practice outing was my idea, I was not longer his adversary. I was his accomplice. What's worse, I was liking it" (Vowell 2000, p.23).

Politically and aesthetically, the liberal and anti-gun activist Vowell equivocates about the act of commemorating history and historical tourism. She loves reconstructed history, yet doubts its value, even while it moves her. It creates a bond between herself and her father and other Americans that can transcend politics, but can also polarize individuals. The book concludes that 'assassination vacations' can have their value, however they must not be used as a substitute for critical thinking about the past, or how we use the past to justify present policies.

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