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Act Three: Shooter

Chicago Playwright Bryn Magnus with a quintessential gun story from his childhood in Wisconsin.  It contains both the fear of guns and the pleasure of shooting one.

Act One: Nra Vs Nea

Sarah Vowell goes home to Montana to try and understand her gunsmith dad a little better.

Act Two: Fists And Guns

Geoffrey Canada, author of the book Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America, talks about what it's like to carry a gun. He also talks about what poor neighborhoods in New York were like before the proliferation of handguns among young people.  When he grew up in the South Bronx, kids had fistfights in a very formal arrangement with formal rules that everyone lived by. He reads from his book and talks with Ira.

Act Two: Gangster's Daughter

Susan Berman, author of the memoir Easy Street, the True Story of a Gangster's Daugher, reads from her book about her father Davie Berman, a Jewish gangster and one of the men — with Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel — who created modern Las Vegas. (7 minutes)Act Two continues after the break.

Act Two: Blue Sky Dream

David Beers explains the gorgeous, modern vision that drew his family, and tons of other families, to California, and then what happened after they arrived.