A very interesting item on MSNBC.com/Newsweek.com (go here and click on "One Nation, Under Gun"), pro-gun the same way that a photo-plus-voice gallery of a dozen gays (mostly in couples) talking calmly and reasonably about their homosexuality would be pro-gay: To people who see gun ownership as the sort of thing that No-One I Know Would Ever Do, simply seeing law-abiding gun owners as normal people — mostly family people, women as well as men, old as well as young — can have a profound effect. ABC seemed to carry a similar item, as did abcnews.com (though photo and text only, without audio).

I should stress that I don't agree with everything that the people depicted say, and I do agree that the item is biased the way that an item depicting a dozen victims of gun crime would be biased: It shows one part of the picture — in my view a needed corrective to the mainstream media's tendency to stress the harm of guns more than the harms of gun control, but nonetheless a biased corrective. Still, it seems to me noteworthy that a mainstream media outlet (ABC News and MSNBC.com/Newsweek.com, though I don't know whether MSNBC and Newsweek carried it, too) devoted time, space, and money to such a project.

The item seems to be based on a book (Armed America) by writer and photographer Kyle Cassidy. The Washington Post reviewed the book positively. The review concluded with "The result is highly political, even polemical. The question is, in which direction? Each picture in Armed America could be a pro-gun advertisement — or an anti-gun poster. That's what makes the book so riveting." I'm skeptical that this is so, for reasons I mentioned at the outset, at least if the abcnews.com and msnbc.com items are representative of the book.

Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.