from the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. This is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

We're delighted that you're listening to this podcast. If you enjoy it, please be sure to

subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify and elsewhere. Please be kind enough to leave us a favorable review, too, if you like it. At the journal's editorial page, we believe strongly in free expression,

and each week on this podcast we explore in depth and candor issues of topical interest. We speak

in considerable depth to people who are leading figures in their field, practitioners, experts,

commentators to give us a better understanding of the big issues of our times. This

week I'm coming to you from London, where in what some may consider an entirely condine set of

circumstances, I have finally contracted COVID and himself isolating. But as we've all discovered

in the last two years, it's one of the virtues of modern technology that we can still be productive

even when somewhat under the weather, thousands of miles from our place of work and locked in a spare bedroom as I am. So I'm delighted to say that the show goes on. And this week, my guest is the acclaimed novelist and commentator Lionel Shriver, an American who now lives in London. Lionel's the author of many novels, the latest of which is, should we stay or should we go?

An exploration of, among other things, aging and end-of-life decisions.

Most famous for her 2003 novel, we need to talk about Kevin, a narrative told in the voice of the mother of a teenager who commits mass murder in a school.

The story resonated widely with readers and a wider public that's become almost inured to such horrors in the last 25 years.

Her insights into the mental health of trouble kids and the challenges that parents face have become only tragically too important in an age when such violence seems almost epidemic.

She's also a very widely read commentator on cultural and political issues and is among other things a contributor to the London Spectator. Lionel Shriver joins me now. Lionel, thank you very much for joining us. Oh, it's nice to talk to another American. Yes, you and I've sort of rather more successfully than I have, but we've lived sort of slightly parallel or rather reflected lives. I'm a Brit who now lives in America. You're an American who now lives in London and so perhaps we can have some observations from each side of the Atlantic about each other's home country. But I want to start with an apology because I know you don't want to always be seen as the sort of go-to person that everybody in the media speaks to when there is another horrific mass killing in a school, because you are rightly known for many, many other things than

that. But of course, your novel, 2003 novel that I mentioned, we need to talk about Kevin,

was a great success. Everybody who's read it agrees a remarkable insight into the challenges

that the parents face, but obviously the mental health conditions that some of these very,

very troubled teenagers find themselves in. So here we are a week after the horrific shooting in New Valley, Texas last week. And so I do, well, I want to get on quickly to other things and to the broader cultural issues I want to discuss with you. I do want to start with that. One of the things I find, as a Brit who lives in America, I often try to explain to a British audience for what of a better word gun culture. A lot of people outside the US

think it's just so simple. Why do they all have these guns? There are 400 million guns in America. Just take most of them away or some of them away. Do what Britain did after a couple of horrific massacres in Britain, do what Australia did, and just get rid of them. I try to explain not always very

successfully that it's much more complicated than that. Before I want to talk about the issue of

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