Next week, thousands of gun dealers, traders, and enthusiasts will gather in Las Vegas for the annual Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show, which touts itself as the largest trade show of its kind in the world. When it does, NBC Sports will be a lead sponsor.

NBC Sports, which has struggled to make its mark in the world of daily televised sports, showcases hunting, fishing, and outdoor shows on its network throughout the day, so its original interest in a trade show aimed at the people who participate in such sports isn’t shocking. But according to some accounts, the SHOT Show is hardly that sort of show. While it bills itself as a huge gathering of hunting and outdoors enthusiasts, the reality is far different, according to a 2011 report from Media Matters, which sent reporters to that year’s event:

The reality of SHOT was thousands of yards downrange from the image projected by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association that owns SHOT and celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. The NSSF portrays SHOT as representing the business interests of family-friendly, outdoors recreation-focused “shooting sports” like elk hunting and clay target shooting. These sports are represented at SHOT, as they are in the firearms industry as a whole, but they’re vastly overshadowed by handguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, home defense shotguns and the like, along with hollow point bullets, concealed carry holsters, tactical clothing and other “personal protection” accoutrements.

This year’s show has an even deeper meaning to its attendees. In the wake of multiple mass killings, with lawmakers at the federal, state, and local levels pursuing sensible restrictions on guns in an effort to curb gun violence, SHOT’s organizers are pitching the event as a show of “industry unity,” as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz noted today:

SHOT Show is billed as the “the largest and most comprehensive trade show for all professionals involved with the shooting sports, hunting and law enforcement industries” and “the world’s premier exposition of combined firearms.” But it is more than just a trade show; according to its organizer, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the trade association for firearms manufacturers and dealers), “Any SHOT attendee will tell you the show is more than about selling and buying; it’s a powerful display of industry unity and its resolve to meet any challenge affecting the right to make, sell and own firearms.”

It’s one thing for NBC Sports to promote the safe and responsible ownership of guns used in the type of outdoor sports it broadcasts. The SHOT Show, though, seems less a place for hunters and outdoorsmen and women than it does a place where attendees can buy, trade, and otherwise gawk at the high-powered, military- and law-enforcement grade weapons and ammunition that, frankly, have no place in a rational society.

There is a marked difference between those types of weapons and the firearms used by hunters and people who shoot for sport. That distinction is often covered up by organizations like the National Rifle Association, which has instead resorted to promoting the paranoid and absurd belief that liberal politicians in Washington are coming after everyone’s guns. Blurring that distinction is profitable for it and possibly even the National Sports Shooting Foundation (which puts on the SHOT Show), the types of groups that often deny the role of guns in mass killings and America’s high rates of gun violence, because the paranoia that results brings larger crowds to gun shows and pads the bottom line.

But that explanation doesn’t work for NBC Sports, which, as a media organization, shouldn’t just want to promote that distinction but has an obligation to. No one is targeting the guns used in hunting and sport-shooting, because we can curb gun violence in this country without attacking the people who are able to safely and responsibly own and operate firearms for sporting purposes. Those guns, and those gun owners, aren’t the root of America’s gun violence problem, and that’s a fact recognized by everyone involved in the debate over how to prevent gun violence in America (yes, even the NRA). By making that distinction clear, NBC Sports could go a long way in making that debate smarter, sharper, and more accurate. It’s a shame it has chosen not to.

GQ has named Beyoncé Knowles the sexiest woman of the millenium, an assessment with which I have no quibble. But what’s most interesting about the resulting profile of her, written by Amy Wallace, and the interview for which took place on the condition that Wallace consent that it be recorded by Knowles in an inversion of the normal agreements between source and subject, is that it’s all about Beyonce’s experience of being watched, often by herself. There are stories of Beyonce watching DVDs of every performance she’s ever made. There’s mention of the autobiographical documentary she’s making for HBO. And then there’s the intense, almost unnerving, archiving Knowles appears to be doing of even her most private life:

Anytime she wants to remind herself of all that work—or almost anything else that’s ever happened in her life—all she has to do is walk down the hall. There, across from the narrow conference room in which you are interviewing her, is another long, narrow room that contains the official Beyoncé archive, a temperature-controlled digital-storage facility that contains virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny’s Child, the ’90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she’s ever done; every video of every show she’s ever performed; every diary entry she’s ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop.

“Stop pretending that I have it all together,” she tells herself in a particularly revealing video clip, looking straight into the camera. “If I’m scared, be scared, allow it, release it, move on. I think I need to go listen to ‘Make Love to Me’ and make love to my husband.”

Beyoncé’s inner sanctum also contains thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a “visual director” Beyoncé employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005. In this footage, Beyoncé wears her hair up, down, with bangs, and without. In full makeup and makeup-free, she can be found shaking her famous ass onstage, lounging in her dressing room, singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” to Jay-Z over an intimate dinner, and rolling over sleepy-eyed in bed. This digital database, modeled loosely on NBC’s library, is a work in progress—the labeling, date-stamping, and cross-referencing has been under way for two years, and it’ll be several months before that process is complete. But already, blinking lights signal that the product that is Beyoncé is safe and sound and ready to be summoned— and monetized—at the push of a button.

Given how invasive paparazzi already are, I can’t imagine inviting more documentation into, say, dinner with a spouse or boyfriend. But I wish the profile had gone longer on this point. Because there’s something fascinating about a woman responding to the relentless commodification of her life by taking very direct control of the process. If you have an archive of every commercial photograph ever taken of you, you’re not going to be surprised when something surfaces. If you have better footage of yourself than anyone could ever put on the market, you have enormous control of what your final image is. And if you’re going to be nitpicked to death, becoming your own most careful critic and curating your image is a way to satisfy yourself, rather than satisfying someone else, even if the standards you’re striving to meet remain enormously high. I’m not sure I could live up to the standards Beyoncé sets for herself, and I wonder if they represent a capitulation to some really horrible cultural norms. But I admire her discipline.

That Joss Whedon’s upcoming S.H.I.E.L.D. show is in development at ABC is less a matter of it being a fit for the network, which focuses heavily on female-centric and family dramas, and more a matter of corporate synergy, now that that ABC and Marvel are both owned by Disney. At the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena yesterday, ABC president Paul Lee got asked how an action show will fit into his lineup, particularly after the cancellation of Last Resort, the fairly gender-balanced thriller about the crew of a nuclear submarine. His answer was less than fully revealing, in part because he only has a script, rather than a full pilot—much less multiple episodes. He explained:

Marvel has the ability to bring the whole family around it. The truth about Joss is he has some great relationships in it. So there are a lot of really funny
male/female relationships, some very flirtatious ones that go through it. But it’s also Joss, too, and it’s Marvel, and there’s a lot of action to it. So we haven’t yet seen the pilot. We fast-tracked that before the others. We are going to see it a lot earlier than the others. And we are very hopeful that that’s going to move forward to series, and we will build our marketing campaign early for it. But we do see that as a possibility of a show that we can bring both men and women and kids to.

I am frankly really glad that Lee is talking about S.H.I.E.L.D. as a show that should attract women and families as part of its basic genetics, rather than as as a bonus to go with a core dudebro demographic. But for that to be meaningful—and it’s very different to get women to tune in to an ongoing show than for us to accept a one-off three hours of a movie where we’re in a decided minority—I think he and Whedon have to think about what’s missing from the depictions of women in The Avengers right now, and Marvel has to be willing to let them have at least some flexibility in terms of broadening both the character base and tone of the show.

And one thing that’s missing right now? Aelationships between men and women in this universe that aren’t flirtatious. The Avengers right now is a franchise where female characters are dating their bosses, acting as honey traps, emotionally close to other coworkers in a way that suggests they’re basically in love, or crushing hard on their superheroic fellow soldier only to lose him to entombment in ice. This is not a good argument that men and women can be friends. You’d think that it’s a task so hard as to require superheroics.