The New Yorker Radio Hour - Fear and the N.R.A., and Lena Dunham on the end of "Girls"

Episode Date: May 19, 2017

In this episode, a gun blogger critiques the N.R.A., and Lena Dunham bids goodbye to “Girls.”     New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

conversation with someone when they have that revelation. It's making sure. But maybe looking at this case, it could be an interesting process. Okay. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

The moment the show Girls went on the air five years ago, it became immediately part of the zeitgeis, the kind of show that's talked about as much as it's actually watched. Girls told the story of a group of 20-somethings struggling with adulthood. And even for HBO, it had a lot of nudity, a lot of uncomfortable sex scenes and people making bad choices of all kinds. Last month, the final episode aired. Just about a year ago, when filming for this last season had just gotten underway,

Lena Dunham joined me in the studio. It was May of 2016, and as it happened, it was a pretty big day. So, Lena, in about two hours, you're going to be at your birthday party, celebrating your 30th birthday. And so what we did is we brought into the studio a big giant bottle of champagne. Let's see if we can uncork it. Oh, my God. And make the appropriate sound. There it is.

Yay. Happy birthday. Thank you, David. This means a lot. I've known you now for four birthdays. That's right. Just so you guys at home can see, it's a bottle of Manashev. that he's poured for me.

That is not true. Now, Turning 30 is an event in anyone's life, but for Lena Dunham, having created a show called Girls, 30 seemed like it might pose a career issue along with the usual angst. Are you anxious at all about turning 30? Your show, your film, your newsletter, your presence in the world has all been about in some way, not being 30. Not being 30, about being young and growing into yourself. And is this odd for you? It's funny you ask. I feel thrilled about it.

I've always liked the idea of being someone who's like, past my major child-bearing portion of things, doing my work, enjoying children who are old enough to talk and have friends who I like regularly meet for ethnic food. Like that's just what I want my life to be. And I feel like, I mean, so much of what the show's about is how full of sort of not just sort of romantic, but existential drama your 20s are.

And I just, the amount of times I text a friend and they write back, I'm depressed, but I'm not sure why, considering my job is good, but maybe my boyfriend just isn't fun enough. Like, it just seems like everybody's problems. Like, I'm talking about obviously a very specific echelon, the highly privileged New Yorkers, girls who live partially supported by their parents in Brooklyn. But I will say that there's a sense that it's like, everybody needs something a little more high stakes to worry about. You are right now filming the last. the sixth and last season of girls. Yeah. And the season we've all just seen

was something immensely deeper, at times darker than what we remembered from the first season, the second season. Are you okay? Yeah, yeah.

I'm great. You know, I work at as the assistant manager in the second biggest cat cafe in Tokyo, and everybody's really jealous. about that and I'm dating this beautiful Japanese man and we're going to lose our opportunities to each other

so everything's really perfect you know like my life is perfect. Yeah, you seem great. Yeah, you're not like, oh wait, you're like fully crying. Yeah. Are you okay? I'm really sad and like fucking lonely.

Did you have any idea when the whole thing started out where you'd end up? This is not a two-hour film. This is a many-hour production. No, I mean, I just calculated it was I was telling my mom, I've directed at this point, not including what I'm doing now, 18 episodes of the show. I'm like, that's, you know, six movies worth of time. That's so much time to get to devote to these characters.

And that's just the episodes that I've had the privilege to direct. And you've written all of them. Written many of them, worked with other writers on them. And I think the thing I didn't realize when we started out was like, I don't think I realized how many, quote unquote, real issues we were going to be able to tackle. Like the first season of the show was very much. to me, I mean, it had its moments of darkness and sadness, but it was very much to me, there were a lot of places I felt like we couldn't or wouldn't go. I don't think I would have been able to articulate that to you at the time, but I think I thought like this is a comedy

about highly privileged girls and there's a certain, and of course they have real feelings, but there's a certain level of kind of, there's a certain level of emotionality that we're never going to be able to touch because these girls' world somehow doesn't warrant it. And then suddenly like we, I realized we had these three-dimensional people and we could hit on things like, you know, unplanned pregnancy, drug addiction, abuse, you know, parental neglect, mental illness, things that I didn't, things, issues that are kind of almost like, I was worried were almost too political to touch. And I actually think as I became more aware of sort of the boundaries that Hollywood particularly places on, quote unquote, like acceptable female behavior, the more I wanted to push. back on it and the more I thought like the more I realized oh there's a space here for us to address things that are as dark as anything that a drama might deal with but just in our own way. And did you have any idea, Lena, where you wanted your four characters and it's more

than four characters really, where you wanted them to end up and where you wanted them to land in terms of their lives? At that point, I remember thinking if we get to make a pilot, to use the language of our people. That will be amazing, and I'll have that in my arsenal. Then when it got picked up, I went, oh, my God, if we get to do one season of this, I can't believe it. So it's more of a scramble than we'd imagine. So for the first two seasons, I think I was living with so much of a fear that all I'd ever heard about TV was like, you get canceled, you get pushed aside.

I didn't believe that we were going to have until probably season three. I don't think I understood that we were going to have the choice, as supportive as HBO was. this was all my baggage. I didn't know that we were going to have the choice to end this how we wanted to and when we wanted to. And so when it became apparent, like probably around season three, that, you know, we were going to get to make this show kind of for as long as we felt we wanted to.

I think that's when we really started to put our heads together and think like, so what's this going to look like? When's the right time to end this? Where do we want these girls to wind up? And I think that's when we were like, oh, let's start thinking about this in a more like holistic long-term way because... With what's called arcs, longer arcs and all that. Exactly.

And then before season five is when we decided like, okay, season six is when we're probably going to want to end this thing. Why? Why? Because you're turning 30? No. Well, it's, it is a kind of neat and tidy coincidence. But I think our feeling was just like we wanted to make sure that we didn't start to overstay our welcome or that it didn't start to feel like that kind of sitcom convention of dragging on these. The fact is, is like, these are characters who've been growing apart for a long time. And so at a certain point, it's going to make sense that their friendships really do splinter. And then what is the show? The one thing I do notice about the show as it's reaching its conclusion.

I don't know anything about next season is that the person you're hardest on is Hannah Horvier. Yeah. That there was a time where you think, oh, she's just being brutal on the Allison Williams character. Just brutal. one schmucky boyfriend after another, odd situation, sexual and otherwise. But increasingly, your hardest on, forgive me for saying this, yourself. Yeah, I think emotionally especially. Like, you know, we, it can be hard to avoid how funny it is.

Allison has this sort of, and she'll joke about it, this like essential tidiness to just her look and her vibe. That means that like it's just so funny to throw her into a situation, into like a hilarious sexual situation. or to cover her in water or to cover her in mud or to have her stuffing her face with weird food. Like there's a contrast there that's funny. But I think at the end of the day, Hannah's probably the character who were the most brutal on in terms of her, just in terms of her development

and in terms of like sort of there being real consequences for her actions. So you're going to come to the end of this. And it's six seasons. And there are many writers that have over time, have observed that there are two periods in a writer's life. The period where you're using up the experience before you were famous. Yeah. But your experience is now of Lena Dunham, who I've been with any number of times,

who walks down Broadway and can't get a block without people saying wonderful things about you, but it's a different experience of life than before. It's for sure a different experience than the experience that the character is having and something I've tried to do, it's impossible for me not to incorporate in some way the weird, like, you know, fun house of mirrors that is being publicly recognizable. But I try to use that experience

and sort of like transmute it into something else. So to take some of the emotions that come from that, the feeling of being exposed or the feeling of being sort of becoming a weird hologram of yourself or a prop in your someone else's life. Do you regret also the self-exposure of social media or on the show or physical, psychological, mental. Is there a price to that as you get older?

A hundred percent of price. There's certain things I'm like, you know, there's certain things I probably don't have the privilege to complain about because of the way that I have, you know, I don't get to be like, why is everybody talking about my health when it's like I've made that completely, I've made that a topic of public discussion. And what I feel good about is that I feel like most of the things I've exposed have started more of a dialogue than about, have started a dialogue that's greater. In this case about endometriosis.

In this case about endometriosis or talking about my OCD or talking about my experience with sexual assault in college, all of those things started dialogues that now exist and continue without me. And it doesn't wipe you out. It doesn't exhaust you. It totally does. And I'm learning more and more to like pick my battles. So then how do you go, birthday is lovely and we'll have a great time tonight and all the rest.

Then there's tomorrow. Yeah. So how do you live the next. part of your life creatively and personally after this enormous chapter and run of artistic achievement and psychological complexity, all of it. Now, there is a kind of door that you're walking through. Well, I think a lot about the show, and who knows how I'll feel afterwards, but I think a lot about it as being a particular period of my life when I really went for it, sort of like excising the trauma of what it was to be young and talking about these issues. And

And I'm really looking forward, you know, like the next book I'm doing is a book of fiction. Tell me about that. And it is so far as you want to. No, I'm thrilled to. A book of fiction. Why that and what's it about? It's a bunch of short stories in a novella. And I suddenly knew it's already done.

Because like the first time we met, I said, maybe you should write more like the essay on Nora Ephra. And by the time I got home from the restaurant where we met, there was on my screen a manuscript of 14 pieces. And you're probably like, God damn it, why? Now I have to fucking read this. That was quick. I just felt strongly like I had stories to tell that weren't exactly my own. And there were, again, it's this thing about kind of taking your experience. Like, I don't want to write about being a famous person. That's the most boring thing in the world.

But there are analogous experiences. There are experiences that might involve some of the same emotional realities that aren't, you know, me going. It was so hard for me to come home to go to work the day after the Metball because I've was tired and felt emotionally drained. That is a bitch, by the way. I mean, it was tiring, but it's not that fun to hear about it. And you've also got a new project, Lenny, which is a newsletter, a web magazine that you've been working on with your collaborator, Jenny Connor.

And it's not really a Lena Dunham branding exercise as such. You've got a real point of view here. Tell me how that came about. That was the goal, which is not to do something that was like a vanity project or a sort of lifestyle site. But it felt as though, like you want to be able to express your opinions about sort of what it is to be female now, both politically and personally in a longer form way. And I wanted to be able to support the voices of other writers because I feel like I think that the Internet can kind of like create the illusion that everybody's getting heard when they're actually not, when they're actually getting drowned out. And so obviously the feminist dialogue on the Internet has never been louder.

And that's a really great thing. But it also creates a lot of discontent about who are the loudest voices and how did they get that way. And so Lenny was the goal was to level the playing field. Right. Lena, you go to campuses here and there. You go to, you're a graduate of Oberlin, which is a big formative. A distinguished arguing college. Distinguished arguing college.

And how do you, when you go to campuses and you have conversations, how does that square with the kind of caricature that we're hearing about all the time, about safe spaces and trigger warnings? mornings and all that stuff. Is that the reality of what you're seeing there or is it more complex? Or what is your sense of the way political discussions are taking place on campus? What's your concern? What do you think is just not a reflection of how it's going on? It's a great question. The last one, I went to Oberlin about a year and a half ago, I believe. Maybe it was more like two years now. And I felt like I went in kind of ready to, I was like, oh, God, am I going to get in

trouble for like, am I going to get, you know, told that I triggered the whole audience and they're going to walk out? Somebody told me there was going to be a protest of me, but they couldn't seem to really explain to me why there was going to be a protest of me. And what I... Did you want to find out? Somebody told me that I was a line item in the story of, what did they say? How does it feel to be a line item in the so many people's story of privilege and oppression? Okay. And I was like, that's a big job. I didn't know I had it. But what I actually found was a bunch of super curious people who wanted to laugh and wanted to be entertained. And I think the thing that's always,

the thing that I felt even when I was at Oberlin, which was the word trigger warning had not even entered the lexicon when I was at Oberlin, was that like there's amazing pluses and amazing minuses to giving young unformed people power over the direction that a community takes. And at its best, it starts these conversations that would never even occur to the adults in the room.

And at its worst, it, like, drives out free speech like wildly and aggressively. You know, I have plenty of stuff. I'm a survivor of sexual assault. I have plenty of stuff that I've got a lot of, you know, anxiety issues. I have plenty of stuff that triggers me. But I also like to be given the respect to, given the respect that I can handle ideas without internalizing them.

And there's some sense that we need to, like, protect students like gentle flowers when the fact is, is like ideas aren't the thing that hurt people. Like I think it's really great the movement within classrooms to not make assumptions about your students' gender or to not make assumptions about how they identify racially or to not make a something to kind of to not form people's identities for them because I've learned so much about this from my sibling, Grace, who's written for the New Yorker before about how bad it feels to be misidentified and how bad it feels to be identified by somebody else's, you know, they see grace, they see a set of breasts, they see feminists, they see feminists, they see feminists. features and they decide to engage with them in a really specific way. And I think it's cool the idea that we're not going to make decisions about who people are until they tell us who they are. That's the thing that I think is super valuable.

Lena, thank you so much. And happy birthday again, Tia. I'm going to clink your glass if I can. I'm so happy to be here with you. It's a joy. Thanks, Amelia. Thank you. Lena Dunham, creator of the show Girls, which aired its last episode just a month ago.

We spoke in 2016. Coming up, Evan Osnows talks with a prominent gun blogger about how the NRA uses fear to get its way. That's just ahead on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last month, Donald Trump addressed the NRA at its annual convention.

He's the first president to do so since Ronald Reagan. Now, Trump hasn't always been an Orthodox conservative on every issue. He's weighing in, for instance, on an infrastructure bill that's likely to cost a trillion dollars. But on gun rights, he has been rock solid. Evan Osnos has reported for the New Yorker on the NRA and the firearms industry, and last month he spent time with a guy named Mike Weiser.

Weiser is simply put, a gun guy, and that's not my description, it's his. Weiser's blog is titled Mike the gun guy. Whoa, wake up, it's a gun, that's the answer. All right? Now, how does this work? It works by putting a magazine in, here, which I'm not going to do. Weiser joined the NRA when he was just 11 years old. He later worked

in his uncle's business, building revolvers. He sold guns wholesale and eventually opened a retail shop. Weiser is also a certified firearms instructor and Evanosnos actually ended up taking one of his classes, stop, I've got a gun, or stop, I'll shoot. You're letting him know that he's now entering, He's moving from burglary to aggravated assault. Evan talked with Mike Weiser in June of last year and found out that he has a pretty unusual position. He's definitely pro-gun rights. But if you read what he writes about the NRA, you think,

I'd watch my back if I were this guy. Weisser is scathing about the organization and how it works to create a climate of fear. You know, as a typical kid in the 50s, I had three hobbies, which was toy soldiers, toy guns, and toy trains. Did you grow up hunting? Were you in a place? No, I did hunt a lot.

I have hunted a lot over the years, but I grew up actually in the middle of Washington, D.C. And as a matter of fact, when I grew up in Washington, which was in the 50s, that's when I joined the NRA when I was 11 years old, because I was a member of a rifle team, an NRA sponsored rifle team that we shot in the rifle range in my brother's junior high school, McFarland Junior High School. and I would take the gun home Fridays in a little sack, walk home for a mile, clean it, play with it, bring it back Monday. And this is the middle of Washington, D.C. and that was not unusual for the way which people thought and dealt with guns back in those days. You now live outside Springfield, Massachusetts, home of Smith and Weston. It's really sort of in the center of the gun world in America. How big of an industry are we talking about? It's actually a very tiny industry. I mean, there are, you know, there are five companies that together If you go in any gun shop, these five companies are maybe six companies.

80% of the guns that are in these shops are made by these six companies. Smith & Wesson has, I don't know, 1,800 employees, Ruger, maybe a couple of thousand. You know, ditto Remington. These are small companies. The contrast between the size of the industry in terms of the dollar amounts as opposed to the public concern about the industry is extraordinary. There's no other industry like that. How do we then understand the fact that when we talk about the gun industry in America, often we associated in the same breath with things like big oil and big tobacco, these vast industrial and political enterprises? So how is it that, in fact, this tiny industry, as you put it, has accumulated such a large political profile?

Largely because of one thing and one thing only, and that's the mass shootings. The mass shootings. Tell me more what you mean. This year, okay, roughly 200 people a day will be seriously injured because somebody pointed a gun at them and pulled the trigger. And this has been going on with this level of violence since the mid-80s. but because it's, for the most part, focused on inner city areas, it's not the kind of thing that gets into the paper because we always think of the inner city as being a place of crime. So what else is new? So it's not the fact that you have this kind of daily in and out, you know, shootings. It's more when something that really newsworthy occurs, and that's obviously when you get a mass shooting.

You joined the NRA when you were 11 years old. Is it a different organization today than it was back then? When I joined the NRA, the organization overwhelmingly focused on sports shooting and hunting. And that's why most people own guns. I mean, in 1955, three-quarters, maybe almost 80% of all the guns that Americans owned were long guns, shotguns, and rifles. And they were owned because the population was overwhelmingly still either rural or it was farming. And the NRA reflected that. What they really began doing in the mid-80s was shift people's attention towards the whole issue of crime, urban crime.

In the history of guns in America, the Rodney King verdict and the riots that followed are important. Tell us the story of what happened. Rodney King was arrested and then severely beaten up by a group of LAPD. The beating was actually caught. somebody was filming it. Three or four of the cops were charged with assault, and the jury came back with a not guilty verdict. And the day that that verdict was announced by that evening,

there were whole sections of downtown L.A. that were up in flames. And there had been riots after Martin Luther King had been shot, too. But in the 1960s, you didn't have video. But I remember sitting in front of my TV set. And there was a camera, a news camera in a helicopter, and a car pulled up at an intersection, and three or four African-American young men pulled this white driver out of the car and began punching him in the middle of the street. And the helicopter with the camera was up there broadcasting it live.

And that broadcast and the subsequent broadcasts were seen in every household in America. And what effect did it have on gun sales? The next day you couldn't get into a gun shop to buy a gun because they were all sold out. Did the impact of that, the idea behind that surge in gun sales, in effect, that was prompted by that racial anxiety and the vision of crime in the city, did that continue or was it a short-term phenomenon? It wasn't, the actual sales weren't. It was the whole notion of using a gun or keeping a gun to protect yourself. That's what continued and grew in terms of the dialogue, in terms of the culture. That's when state-level NRA organizations began pushing for concealed carry.

That's when a group of right-wing lawyers first began planning a case that would eventually get to the court, which it did in 2008. So it wasn't so much that the gun sales continued at a high level, but it was more that the whole kind of culture of the industry and the whole discussion about guns changed and continued. If we want to get a window into how the NRA talks about crime and the fear of crime, it might be useful to listen to a clip from Wayne LaPierre, the NRA. Tragedy introduced us to the heroes of Sam Bernardino's police department. But tragedy is routine in their city where politicians slashed their budget and cut their ranks. Now violent gangs wage bloody turf wars every night.

They have all the guns they want, but law-abiding California citizens live in fear. Their governor says he serves them, while he releases 2,300 convicted murderers back to the same streets they terrorize. The elites lecture about compassion. But if there was even an inkling that these killers would head for Beverly Hills or Berkeley, they'd die behind bars. The elites and their families will always be protected. It's the law-abiding average Californians who face nightfall alone with their faith and what's left of their guns. I'm the National Rifle Association of America, and I'm freedom's safest place. Mike, we hear in that a whole range of different kinds of artifacts of this moment, different kinds of threats, presumably, to people's safety.

Can you explain what it is that's going on there? What would inspire that message? And what does the NRA hope people will get from it? There's no reality to any of this. What there is is a consistent attempt to marshal support on a basis of fear on one hand and patriotism on the other. How much do people believe it and how much do they say this is nonsense? Here's the problem. I mean, I sold guns to over nine or 10,000 people in my gun shop, okay?

And I can tell you when they walked in and they bought the gun, they walked in to buy the gun, they walked in to buy the gun. gun because they wanted to buy a gun. You're not buying something that you need, okay? It's something to buy, okay? And nobody wants to admit that they just spent 500 bucks on something that they didn't need. So they'll just throw out whatever is in their head. And whatever is in their head is usually what they heard from somebody else. Oh, I need a gun for self-defense.

But the bottom line is the number of people who really ultimately use a gun in self-defense. is a very, very tiny fraction of the number of people who own and number of people who buy guns. And as far as the idea of the, you know, the patriotic side, I mean, you can use a patriotic argument for really anything. I mean, when was the last time you went to the Super Bowl and at the end of the halftime show didn't see the Blue Angels fly overhead? That's not an appeal to patriotism. Of course it is. What does it have to do with the Super Bowl? Nothing.

So if we want to understand what sells guns, it seems that these days, and gun companies these days are setting records, in fact. What are the factors that actually have contributed to this profitable period? There's only one thing. There's only one thing which spikes gun sales. And this has been historically true since as long as I've been in the gun business, which is 50 years. And that's the fear that you won't be able to get a gun. The fear that you won't be able to get a gun. Correct. But hold on, because it hasn't.

the laws on guns have in fact been relaxed in a whole variety of ways in various states, allowing, making it easier, for instance, to be able to get a concealed carry permit. So how is it that if the laws are in fact getting more relaxed? Evan, do you think that there's any relationship between the marketing slogans and the marketing campaigns of the gun industry and fact? I mean, are we in the same conversation here? Listen, you know, in my town. in my town, in which has the most deliciously clean drinking water that you can imagine,

you should see people who line up and buy bottled water. Okay? There's no relationship. So when you listen to Wayne LaPierre talking about the things that he's afraid of in America, you hear over and over again this emphasis on fear that one should be afraid, that one has to be afraid, and that one has to protect themselves. against these. You know, it's not, I need to interrupt you right there.

You said, listen, Wayne, not Pierre, what he's afraid of. No, it's not what he's afraid of. It's what the public opinion surveys tell him people are afraid of. Both Pew and Gallup, but I take Pew to be a little more scientific, a little, not much, are astonished to discover that as the rate of violent crime continues to go down, the percentage of people that they survey who say that violent crime is going up gross. But the fact is that the ability to create, you know, in the public mind, a reality that may not really match the facts happens all the time and not just in the gun world. One of the things that we heard in that clip is that Wayne LaPier talked about, quote, what's left of our guns, which is sort of a surprising thing to say.

We have 310 million guns in America, never had more. What is he talking about? What sort of message is he trying to say? What he's trying to do, and this has been a very successful message. Okay, is the idea that, you know, they play it both ways. They want guns to be a mainstream, ordinary thing that everybody accepts. And yet at the same time, they want all the gun owners to think that they're this persecuted minority. And the moment that you can make people think that they're a persecuted minority, you can really rev them up.

So that's what that part of that clip was about was to remind the gun owners that they are in peril. and they are vulnerable because the elites, the policymakers, whatever you want to call them, don't like guns. And if they turn their backs for one second, they're going to take them away. We're going to play another clip here, which is from an NRA video series called Defending Our America. New Orleans is a perfect example of how fast law enforcement was overrun and how fast they turned to their primal instincts because New Orleans PD had a huge chunk of officers that just said, I'm done. I'm going home with my family because I can't do this. And when you have an environment where law enforcement can't effectively enforce the law, the predators are going to start to take over and they'll move in and take over an area faster than anybody can even comprehend.

Well, what I'm interested in, if you look back over the history of the NRA, oftentimes natural disasters or any kind of disruption in social order, if you want to call it that, becomes an opportunity to reach out to people. And you've seen this in Florida, for instance, after a hurricane. The hurricane was invoked as a reason to pass the stand-your-ground law, which, as we know, removed the requirement to retreat, gave people greater latitude to use a gun. Also increased the homicide rate, but that's okay. Mike, what do you think the effect is on people of hearing messages like that?

Do you think they believe it? You know, remember that the NRA is kind of like everybody else these days. You're on the Internet. You've got to stay on all the time. You have to have a new message every day or it gets stale. I don't think people listen that closely. I'm sure there's a segment of the population that's going to go by that freeze-dried food from the Glambeck show. But, you know, I can tell you that whenever there was around the town where my gun shop is,

Whenever there was a word that there was going to be a big storm coming in, a really bad one, where, you know, there's going to be disruption of basic services. What everybody did was run to the supermarket and buy food. I didn't notice them coming into the gun shop to buy an extra gun. We're going to play one other clip here, which is from the NRA's video series called Freedom's Safest Place. To the high tollers of Iran and every terrorist you enabled. Listen up. You might have met our fresh food. Face Flower Child President and his wheat-need Ivy League friends.

But you haven't met America. You haven't met the heartland where the people will defend this nation with their bloody, callous bare hands. That's what it takes. You haven't met the steel workers and the hard rock miners or the swamp folks in Cajun country who can wrestle a full-grown gator out of the water. You haven't met the farmers, the cowboys, the loggers, and the truck drivers. You don't know the mountain men who live off the land or the brave cops who fight the good fight in the urban war zones? No, you've never met America. And you ought to pray you never do.

I'm the National Rifle Association of America, and I'm the freedom's safest place. Welcome to Grand Ole Opry. Mike, what do you make of that? It's pure entertainment. Is that how it's intended, do you think? Two-thirds of all guns are owned by the, by the residents of 13 Confederate states, three border states,

and rural parts of four Midwestern states, okay? That's gun culture. So when you play Charlie Daniels, you are... You're playing to that culture. And, you know, go to an NRA show, and that's who's walking around. He's right. That's not where the Ivy League, what did he call?

I think fresh-based flower chops. Fresh-faced flower chiles. You don't know, exactly. And, you know, this country has always been much more a regional than a national country. And the regionalism involved in guns is very, very intense and hasn't really changed. Do you think there is secondary effects of marketing on the basis of fear, of promoting fear and, frankly, a kind of hatred when it comes to our, our culture or any culture. I mean, what is the effect?

I think, unfortunately, that that is what it may emerge out of this, you know, the very recent coincidence of fear and this whole immigration thing. Because what is really coming out, you know, what's really being pumped up in immigration is fear of people who are unlike us. And to the extent that Muslims are much more unlike us, so it's claimed, it's not true, but so it's claimed. And that, unfortunately, then flows right back to the whole notion of, well, I'm afraid I better have a gun. Over the years, you have seen that the NRA has placed a greater emphasis on the role of fear, on the effects of fear, and frankly on the opportunities presented by fear. How does that change the way you look at the NRA?

Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, if the NRA would be supporting guns on a basis of what I believe they should be used for by civilians, which is shooting sports and hunting, they get no argument for me. I have never seen, and I'm very serious about this, I have never seen one piece of credible research which shows or even remotely shows that walking around with a gun protects you. from crime or protects you from anything else. And I'm not going to get into an argument because somebody comes up with an anecdote here and an anecdote there.

Either we have research or we don't. And the research, and I've seen it and I've read all of it, the research simply does not support the point of view that armed citizens are doing anything to make our community safe. If anything, to the contrary. And as far as I'm concerned, you don't sell a consumer product that you don't sell a consumer a product that creates risk. We can't talk about guns today without talking about mass shootings.

We are, after all, talking just a few days after a massacre in Orlando, Florida, of the largest mass shooting in American history, which killed 49 people, injured dozens of others. And I wonder whether, in fact, this will have a meaningful effect on our discussion of guns in America, or will it become just another name, another place on the list? We have had two major gun control pieces of legislation at a federal level. 1968, Gun Control Act of 68, which set up the whole regulatory environment, and then, of course, 1994 with Brady. Both of those laws happened with liberal Democrats who were Southerners in the White House and Democratic control of Congress.

We did not have that after Sandy Hook. Without that kind of constellation, I don't see a gun bill passing. Mike, thank you very, very much for talking with us. My pleasure. Anytime. Mike Weiser, a former gun dealer, safety instructor, and author of six books on guns. He blogs as Mike the Gun Guy on Huffington Post. You can find Evan Osnos' reporting on the NRA and politics in Washington, and a lot more at New Yorkerradio.org.

You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm David Remnick, and welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, next weekend is the official, unofficial start of summer. So we're going to do something a little different to get you in the mood. It's a piece of fiction called Memorial Day. And it's set, no kidding, on Memorial Day. And it's by the writer Peter Cameron.

The story is told by a teenage boy suffering silently through the holiday with his mom, and a stepfather he just can't accept. It's performed here by Noah Galvin, one of the stars of the ABC comedy, The Real O'Neills. So here's Memorial Day. I am eating a grapefruit with a grapefruit spoon my mother bought last summer from a door-to-door salesman on a large three-wheeled bike.

My mother and I were sitting on the front steps that day, and we watched him glide down the street, into our driveway, and up our front walk. He opened his case on the handlebars, and was full of fruit appliances, pineapple cores, melon ballers, watermelon cedars, orange juice squeezers, and grapefruit spoons.

My mother bought four of the spoons, and the man peddled himself out of our lives. That was about a year ago. Since then, a lot has changed, I think, as I pry the grapefruit pulp away from the skin with the serrated edge of the spoon. Since then, my mother has remarried, my father has moved to California,

and I have stopped talking. Actually, I talk quite a lot at school, but never at home. I have nothing to say to anyone here. Across the table from me, drinking postum, is my new stepfather. He wasn't here last year. I don't think he was anywhere last year. His name is Lonnie, and my mother met him at a Seth Speaks seminar. Seth is this guy without a body who speaks out of the mouth of this lady

and tells you how to fix your life. Both Lonnie and my mother have fixed their lives. One day at a time, my mother says, every morning, smiling at Lonnie, and then, less happily, at me. Lonnie is only 13 years older than I am. He is 29, but looks about 14. When the three of us go out together, he is mistaken from my brother. Listen to this, Lonnie says.

Both Lonnie and my mother continue to talk to me, consult with me, and read things to me. in the hope that I will forget and speak. If gypsy moths continue to destroy trees of their present rate, North America will become a desert incapable of supporting any life by the year 4,000. Lonnie has a morbid sense of humor and delights in macabre newspaper fillers. Because he knows I won't answer, he doesn't glance up at me. He continues to stare at his paper and says, Wow, think of that.

I look out the window. My mother is sitting in an inflated rubber boat in the swimming pool, scrubbing the fiberglass walls with a stiff brush and Mr. Clean. They get stained during the winter. She does this every memorial day. We always open the pool this weekend, and she always blows up the yellow boat, puts on her Yankees hat so her hair won't turn orange, and paddles around the edge of the pool, leaving a trail of suds. Last year, as she scrubbed, the diamond from her old engagement ring fell out and sank to the bottom of the pool. She was still married to my father, although they were planning to separate after a last family vacation in July.

My mother shook the suds off her hand and raised it in front of her face, her fingers flat, as if she were admiring a new ring. Oh, Stephen, she said. I think I've lost my diamond. What, I said. I still talked then. The diamond fell out of my ring. Look. I got up from the chair I was sitting on and kneeled beside the pool.

She held out her hand the way women do in old movies when they expect it to be kissed. I looked down at her ring, and she was right. The diamond was gone. The setting looked like an empty hand tightly grabbing nothing. Do you see it? she asked, looking down into the pool. Because we had just taken the cover off, the water was murky. It must be down there, she said.

Maybe if you dove in? She looked at me with a nice, pleading look on her face. I took off my shirt. I felt her looking at my chest. There's no hair on my chest, and every time my mother sees it, I know she checks to see if any has grown. I dove into the pool. The water was so cold, my head ached.

I opened my eyes and swam quickly around the bottom of the pool. I felt like one of those Japanese pearl fissures. But I didn't see the diamond. I surfaced and swam to the side. I don't see it, I said. I can't see anything. Where's the mask? Oh, dear, my mother said.

Didn't we throw it away last year? I forget, I said. I got out of the pool and stood shivering in the sun. Suddenly, I got the idea that if I found the diamond, maybe my parents wouldn't separate. I know it sounds ridiculous, but at that moment, standing with my arms crossed over my thin chest watching my mother begin to cry in her inflatable boat,

at that moment, the diamond sitting on the bottom of the pool took on a larger meaning. And I thought that if it were replaced in the tiny clutching hand of my mother's ring, we might live happily ever after. So I had my father drive me downtown, and I bought another diving mask at the five and ten, and when we got home, I put it on,

first, spitting on the glass so it wouldn't fog, and dove into the water. And dove again and again, until I actually found the diamond, glittering in a mess of leaves and bloated inchworms at the bottom of the pool. I throw my grapefruit rind away and go outside and sit on the edge of the diving board with my feet in the water. My mother watches me for a second, probably deciding if it's worthwhile to say anything. Then she goes back to her scrubbing.

Later, I'm sitting by the mailbox. Since I've stopped talking, I've written a lot of letters. I write to men in prison and I answer personal ads, claiming to be whatever it is the place or desires. An elegant, educated young lady for afternoon pleasure or a GBM. The mail from prison is the best, long, long letters about nothing, since it seems nothing is done in prison. A lot of remembering, a lot of remembering, a lot of,

bizarre requests, send me a shoehorn, send me an empty egg carton, arts and crafts, send me an electric toothbrush. I like writing letters to people I've never met. Lani is planting geraniums he bought this morning in front of the A&P when he did the grocery shopping. Lonnie is very good about doing his share. I am not about mine. Every night I wait with delicious anticipation for my mother to tell me to take out the garbage. How many times do I have to tell you? Can't you just do it? Lonnie gets up and walks over to me,

trowel in hand. He has on plaid Bermuda shorts and a Disney World t-shirt. If I talked, I'd ask him when he went to Disney World. But I can live without the information. Lonnie flips the trowel at me, and it slips like a knife into the ground

a few inches from my leg. Bingo! Lonnie says. Scare you? I think when a person stops talking, people forget that he can still hear. Lonnie is always saying dumb things to me, things you'd only say to a deaf person or a baby. What a day, Lonnie says, as if to illustrate this point.

He stretches out beside me, and I look at his long white legs. He has sneakers and white socks on. He never goes barefoot. He's too uptight. to go barefoot. He would step on a piece of glass immediately. That's the kind of person, Lonnie is. The Captain Ice Cream truck rolls lazily down our street. Lonnie stands up and reaches in his pocket. Would you like an ice pop? He asks me, looking at his change. I shake my head, no. An ice pop? Where did he grow up? Kentucky? Lonnie walks into the street and flags down the ice cream man.

as if it isn't obvious what he's standing there for. The truck slows down and the ice cream man jumps out. It's a woman. What can I get you? she says, opening the freezer on the side of the truck. It's the old-fashioned kind of truck, with the ice cream hidden in its frozen depths. I always thought you needed to have incredibly long arms to be a good Captain Ice Cream person.

Well, I'd like a nice ice pop, Lonnie says. A twin bullet, suggests the woman. What flavor? Do you have cherry? Lonnie asks. Sure, the woman says. Cherry, grape, orange, lemon, cola, and tootie-frutti.

For a second, I have a horrible feeling that Lonnie will want a tuti-frutie. I'll have a cherry, he says. Lonnie comes back, peeling the sticky paper from his cherry bullet. It's a bright pink color. The truck drives away. Guess how much this cost, Lonnie says, sitting beside me on the grass. 60 cents. It's a good thing you didn't want one.

He licks his fingers and then the ice stick. You want a bite? He holds it out toward me. Lonnie is so patient and so sweet. It's just too bad. He's such a nerd. I take a bite of his cherry bullet. Good, huh? Lani says.

He watches me eat for a second, then takes a bite himself. He breaks the bullet in half and eats it in a couple of huge bites. A little pink juice runs down his chin. What are you waiting for? he asks. I nod toward the mailbox. It's Memorial Day, Lonnie says. The mail doesn't come. He stands up and pulls the trowel out of the ground.

I think of King Arthur. There's no mail for anyone today, Lonnie says, no matter how long you wait. He hands me his two bullet sticks and returns to his geraniums. I have this feeling holding the stained wooden sticks, that I will keep them for a long, long time, and come across them one day and remember this moment incorrectly. After the coals and the barbecue have melted into powder, the fireflies come out.

They hesitate in the air, as if stunned by dusk. Lonnie and my mother are sitting beside the now clean pool, and I am sitting on the other side of the natural forsythia fence that is planted around it, watching the bat swoop from tree to tree, feeling the darkness clot all around me. I can hear Lonnie and my mother talking, but I can't make out what they're saying.

I love this time of day. Early evening, early summer. It makes me want to cry. We always had a barbecue on Memorial Day with my father, and my mother cooked this year's hamburgers on her new barbecue, which Lonnie bought her for Mother's Day. She's old enough to be his mother, but she isn't. I would have said,

if I talked. She cooked them in the same dumb, cheerful way she cooked last years. She has no sense of sanctity or ritual. She would give Lonnie my father's clothes if my father had left any behind to give. My mother walks toward me with the hose, then passed me toward her garden to spray the pea plants.

Okay, she yells to Lonnie, who stands by the spigot. He turns the knob and then goes inside. The light in the kitchen snaps on. My mother stands with one hand on her hip, the other raising and lowering the hose, throwing large fans of water over the garden. She used to bathe me every night,

and I think of the peas hanging in their green skins, dripping. I lie with one ear on the cool grass, and I can hear the water drumming into the garden. It makes me sleepy. Then I hear it stop, and I look up to see my mother walking toward me, the skin on her bare legs and arms glowing. She sits down beside me, and for a while she says nothing. I pretend I'm asleep on the ground, although I know she knows I'm awake. Then she starts to talk, as I knew she would.

my mother says you are breaking my heart she says it as if it were literally true as if her heart were actually breaking I just want you to know that she says you're old enough to know that you

are breaking my heart I sit up I look at my mother's chest as if I could see her heart breaking. She has on a polo shirt with a little blue whale on her left breast. I'm afraid to look at her face. We sit like that for a while, and darkness grows around us. When I open my mouth to speak, my mother uncoils her arm from her side and covers my mouth with her hand. I look at her. Wait, she says. Don't say anything yet.

I can feel her flesh against my lips. Her wrist smells of chlorine. The fire flies, lighting all around us, make me dizzy. Memorial Day, performed for us by Noah Galvin. It first appeared in The New Yorker in 1983. The author Peter Cameron went on to write, Someday this pain will be useful to you. And more recently, Coral Glynn.

That'll do it. I'm David Remnick. I hope you enjoy the show and hope you have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.