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Welcome to the Double X podcast for Thursday, December 27th, the Home for the Holiday's edition.

Merry Christmas to all of you, except for the Jews and the Muslims and the Buddhists and the

atheists and everyone else. Merry whatever to you. This is Hannah Rosen, recording from the Washington, D.C. studio. And I am joined today by Alison Benedict, a double-ex editor in New York. Hi, Allison. Hi, Alson. Hi, guys. And also Noreen Malone from the New Republic. Hi, Noreen. Hey, Hannah. So our three topics today are one is Nancy Lanzah, the mother of Adam Lansa, the shooter in the Newton killing and the growing world of women gun owners.

Second is the new Judd-Abatow movie, This is 40.

And third is whether the holidays, which you are all actually right now experiencing, are holidays or are a form of family hell, the eternal question that we are all mulling right at this moment.

So let's start with our newsy topic, which is Nancy Lanza.

With mass shooters who are almost always male, we wonder about the culture of anxious modern masculinity,

where boys inherit their father's fixation on violence. But this time in the Newton shooting,

there was a twist. It was the shooter's mother, not father, Nancy Lanza, who was the gun nut,

who stashed powerful weapons and bragged about them at bars. But Nancy's not an aberration

at a time when more women are living alone. And when it's becoming more acceptable for women to be aggressive, more of them are buying and shooting guns. So we're going to talk about that trend now and what it's all about. Is it about self-protection? Is it about empowerment? Is it about bragging rights or sexiness? What's going on here? Alison, I'll start with you. We had what I

thought was a great piece in Double X by Porchista Kokpour, who is Iranian-American and was describing

her own personal trajectory with gun ownership and what it meant to her and how she changed her mind.

So can you talk a little bit about her take on this subject? It's a really beautiful piece.

I encourage everyone to look it up.

She basically was 25 and she had gone through a couple of traumatic situations being

date raped, being assaulted by a couple of men, being the victim of some violent muggings.

...