Well, maybe the story I just read is not quite that unnewsworthy, but it's close. From The AP:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, who once owned a .45-caliber revolver, is not licensed to carry a concealed handgun in Texas. State officials refused Monday to reveal whether she has ever been licensed.

Miers' brother gave her the Smith & Wesson handgun when he was worried about her living alone in Dallas. Judge Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, a longtime friend of Miers', has said she kept the gun for a long time. . . .

State law requires the release of information about license holders but not former license holders, said Pamela Smith, assistant general counsel for the agency.

A person in Texas can own a gun without a concealed handgun license. Texas is one of 43 states that allow concealed weapons, and more than 230,000 residents are registered under the law.

The Texas state archives on Monday released thousands of pages of documents related to Miers' days as chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission, from 1995 to 2000, and her correspondence with then-Gov. George W. Bush. . . .

Now I did get an e-mail from someone who said that he'd heard that Miers did have a concealed-carry license, so I suppose the article has value in rebutting this rumor (though only in some measure, since it speaks only of current Texas licenseholders; if Miers lives in Virginia, for instance, she might have a Virginia license).

But my sense is that it's a pretty low-level rumor, which leaves me still wondering why her lack of a concealed-carry license -- a lack that she shares with the overwhelming majority of Texas gun owners (only a bit more than 1% of the Texas population has a concealed-carry license, which probably amounts to no more than 3% to 5% of the Texas gun-owning population) -- is a news item, especially one for the first paragraph in the story. There's nothing illegitimate about noting this; I'm just surprised that the author and his editors saw it as worth noting.