Lindsay McCrum has certainly gotten some ink – and no small number of electrons – for her coffee table book, Chicks With Guns. The photography is nicely done, if not imaginatively composed. Check out a few rigidly, repetitively posed examples. But as anyone who knows much about guns is well aware, McCrum’s “discovery” isn’t terribly Earth-shattering. That women know, use and love their gats is, of course, only noteworthy to people who figure the ranks of gun-owners is confined to bitter clingers and backwoods sister-humpers. But checking out the 35 snaps Life has compiled at Barrel Fever: Women and Their Guns is a useful reminder that chicks have been into their guns pretty much since the flintlock days. And maybe it’s just me, but the photojournalistic style of most of Life’s pics drives that point home in a way that McCrum’s glossy, Liebovitz-inspired style just doesn’t.