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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. Today I'm speaking

with my colleague Deborah Friedel, a contributing editor at the LRB, who has a piece in the new

issue of the paper on America's guns. It's a review of an unauthorised

history of the National Rifle Association, the NRA, by Frank Smith, published by Flatiron Books

earlier this year. Hello, Deborah, and thank you very much for joining me. Hello, Tom.

Guns have a place in American culture, in American life that can seem quite alien to a foreigner, to a European.

For example, seeing the images of heavily armed men outside the Wisconsin state capital,

heavily armed civilians, not policemen, not soldiers, demanding an end to the lockdown a few months ago,

was striking, to say the least.

Of course, it didn't look normal to many Americans either.

But the idea that something like

that could be legal, I still find hard to get my head around. Did you grow up around guns

among gun owners? No. My family never kept guns, though it is true that when I was growing up,

I often played, you know, with a little girl my age,

you know, two doors down, who had sort of a fabulous doll collection. I really wanted her

American girl doll and her father had a gun and we knew where it was. But otherwise, not really.

I do remember the first time I think I really

...