We Want Media

The debut issue of Garden & Gun, “a glossy new lifestyle magazine from Charleston, S.C.,” faced a shaky start when it hit newsstands earlier this month, just days before the shootings at Virginia Tech.

According to a report in the New York Times, the magazine is more about “Southern Lifestyle” and less about guns (which the magazine’s publisher “calls a metaphor for ‘the sporting life’”). However, it still raises the question of whether it is really appropriate today to launch a magazine with a reference to guns in the title when gun violence is such a national concern.

The Times article quotes Samir Husni, the head of the University of Mississippi’s journalism department: “In this day and age, any title that you have to explain, you know it’s not the right title.”

I don’t think that changing the title is a necessary move. But I also don’t think it would have been an impossible task for the magazine’s creators to have found another way to make reference to the sporting lifestyle and avoided using the word “gun” at the same time.

Then again, then they’d be forfeiting such an adorable little alliteration device. Just listen: “Garden & Gun”? That’s certainly music to the ears.