Political interests don't come much more bare-knuckled than an individual's right to bear arms and the state's right to kill. Though seemingly disparate interests on the surface, unrestricted gun ownership and capital punishment flow from a similar frontier mentality at the root of our modern predicament.

Today and tomorrow, a nun who has made it her vocation to oppose capital punishment will make a case for the dismantling of the state-sponsored mechanism of death at gatherings that will attract hundreds.

Across town tomorrow night, the vice president of the United States, will deliver the keynote address to 60,000 members of the National Rifle Association at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

With the pomp and power of his office in tow, Dick Cheney probably won't preside over gatherings as quiet as those that will greet Sister Helen Prejean, the author of "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the U.S."

Gun ownership is next to godliness in a country that has struggled to connect the dots of the millennial kingdom one bullet at a time. Cheney knows that carefully chosen words will advance the myth of our nation's bulletproof virtue one more night as long as he remembers to evoke the names of gun-toting patriots and saints.

In contrast to the vice president, Prejean has a nun's pessimism about the human condition. Nuns believe that matters of conscience are too important to be left to the cold mechanism of state control or the white-hot political passions of the moment.

With so many lives in the balance, Prejean unequivocally rejects the cynicism of trigger-happy politicians who work overtime to keep America's death rows filled to capacity.

The vice president can be as sentimental as he wants to be in equating NRA membership with patriotism, but even the Flying Nun knows there's a connection -- tentative though it may be -- between rituals of capital punishment rooted in American frontier justice and the ubiquity of guns in the 19th century.

In the Old West that gun enthusiasts wax rhapsodic about, capital punishment was often divorced from established institutions of justice. Horse thieves, insurrectionists, train robbers, Mormons and racial minorities dangled from trees and telegraph poles like withered fruit, usually without benefit of legal counsel or trial. Guns and rope went together like twin sons of different mothers.

The ocean of guns in the Old West abetted the spread of anarchy and violence like an ancient plague. Corrupt forms of justice and capital punishment sprung up in opposition to it. Guns and the arbitrary nature of capital punishment are inextricably linked in American history, though rarely discussed in tandem.

Sister Prejean and Vice President Cheney are discussing aspects of the same depressing reality this weekend, though partisans on both sides might question the relevance of one to the other.

Clearly, different views of American rights and justice will be aired on podiums and panel discussions this weekend. By virtue of its size, the NRA is already receiving the lion's share of the reporting, but there are other views of democratic responsibility out there.

Today, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law is hosting a daylong exploration of the death penalty that will feature Prejean and a retinue of legal scholars dissecting the issue.

Tomorrow morning, Prejean will conduct a symposium on suffering and revenge at the Twentieth Century Club that is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Call 412-661-4224 for information.

Prejean will also lead a Pitt Arts seminar on religious belief and social justice tomorrow afternoon. Call 412-624-4498 for more details. She will autograph her book after a screening of "Dead Man Walking" at the Harris Theater, Downtown tomorrow evening.