As part of a collaboration with the National Writing Project, this is the first in a series of teacher-created educator guides on key topical issues. Written by two NWP-affiliated high school English and media arts teachers – Kirsten Spall of Natomas Charter High School (Sacramento) and Chris Sloan of Judge Memorial Catholic School (Salt Lake City) – the guide helps teachers explore and navigate the highly-charged political and emotional issues behind the topic of gun control. Based on content featured on The Lowdown, the guide provides ideas for integrating the issues into English language arts and social studies curriculum. It includes Common Core Standards Alignment, a synopsis of key background information, integration tips, and lists of issue pros and cons, creative writing prompts and best classroom practices.

Download the entire guide here (PDF)

Recently arrived Irish immigrants in the the mid-1800s.

Ever since the first Europeans landed here over four centuries ago, America has had a conflicted relationship with its newcomers. It’s a serial drama that continues today in the halls of Congress, as legislators wrestle with a new generation of immigration reform. We are, of course, a nation of immigrants: the U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, but is home to about 20 percent of its migrants. And the vast majority of us – everyone, in fact, except for American Indians – can trace our roots to foreign lands. Despite that common thread, though, America has not always treated its newest residents with the most empathy.

There have been four major waves of immigration to America, the last of which – mainly from Mexico and other Latin American countries - continues today. Several themes play out consistently in all four chapters:

• Each successive wave of immigrants has been, to an extent, a reflection of conditions elsewhere in the world.
• Each cycle of newcomers has faced animosity and backlash from the already assimilated.
• The history of America’s immigration policy is one of continual repetition and vacillation, a revolving door that often swings open during periods of economic prosperity and slams shut when times get tough.

Scroll through the timeline below to follow the tangled history of America’s ever-changing immigration policies. The interactive chart beneath it shows rates of legal immigration from 1820 to the present (use the scroll bar to zoom into specific chunks of time).

Number of Foreign-Born Legal Permanent Residents, 1820 to 2012

Source: Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics

View data table

The Haymarket affair, as depicted in a Harper’s Magazine engraving (Wikimedia Commons)

For some, May Day means prancing awkwardly around a feather-wreathed pole.

But that ancient Druid rite of Spring is likely not what today’s immigrant rights protestors have in mind.

In about 80 countries throughout the world, May Day is actually an official labor holiday, often commemorated with large strikes, rallies, and demonstrations in support of workers rights. The day’s roots date back to a heated struggle for something that most of us now take for granted: the eight-hour work day.

Also known as International Workers Day, May Day has become largely overlooked in the U.S.; we celebrate our own federal labor holiday four months later, which is pretty ironic, considering that it commemorates an event that happened on American streets.

A long tradition of income inequality and labor struggle

Income inequality in America (and most other places in the world, for that matter) is certainly nothing new. Dating back to colonial times, there has consistently been a fairly large chasm separating society’s small number of rich and powerful – those who control the means of production (who Karl Marx famously referred to as “capitalists”) – and the laboring masses who keep the machines humming (Marx called them the “proletariat”).

The actual size of the gulf between the two groups, however, has vacillated significantly over the course of America’s history. Today, that gap is pretty huge, a disparity that spurred the Occupy Movement protests two years ago, and heightened public demand for a more level playing field.

In the late 19^th Century, the income divide was similar in scope to what it is now, and the effort to mobilize working classes often resulted in explosive clashes with authorities, many of which  make most of today’s protests look more like, well, dances around the may pole.

A 1911 Industrial Worker publication illustraiton critiquing the capitalist system. (Wikimedia Commons)

In the period known as The Gilded Age, which stretched from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, America went through a period of dramatic economic growth and industrialization. This resulted in huge concentrations of wealth. The growth also demanded a larger workforce, which in turn fueled a sudden population boom in cities around the country, where millions of poor European immigrants  flocked in search of opportunity.

Chicago: A hub of industry and worker discontent

Chicago’s population, in particular, grew exponentially: in 1870, a mere 300,000 people lived in the city, but by 1900, it was home to roughly 1.7 million. German immigrants composed the largest ethnic group. The city became a major industrial hub and focus of labor organizing efforts. In the near complete absence of binding labor laws, newly arrived workers often toiled in wretched and dangerous conditions, working long hours for paupers wages. The eight-hour work day was still a distant goal, and challenges to the existing order were often met with repressive and violent retaliation from employers and authorities.

A brief period of economic slowdown in the early 1880s gave rise to successful organizing campaigns by militant socialist and anarchist labor leaders, who picked May 1, 1886 as the target date by which the eight-hour day would be established.

The convention resolved that:

“Eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labour from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to labour organizations throughout this jurisdiction that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution by the time named.”

Labor unions in cities across the country prepared for a general strike in support of the demand, and on May 1, large rallies were held throughout the nation.

A flier promoting the the Chicago labor rally (Wikimedia Commons)

Two days later, strikers gathered outside Chicago’s McCormick Harvesting Machine Company Plant (known as “The Reaper Works”), which for months had locked out workers. A clash erupted between police and protesters, and two workers were killed.

The Haymarket Affair

In response, anarchist labor leaders quickly organized another rally the following evening in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. That night, a large crowd amassed to hear speeches from several prominent labor leaders. The event proceeded peacefully until large numbers of police arrived and ordered the remaining workers to disburse. As the police advanced on the crowd, a homemade bomb was thrown. In the melee that ensued, seven policeman were killed, mostly by friendly fire. Police then proceeded to fire on the crowd, killing at least four demonstrators and injuring scores of others.

The seven anarchists initially sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer during the Haymarket incident (Wikimedia Commons)

In the event’s aftermath, labor activists, particularly anarchist agitators, were viewed by authorities with heightened suspicion, as were many immigrant workers, and a number of subsequent organizing efforts were violently suppressed by police. In a desperate effort to identify the perpetrators of the Haymarket incident, Chicago authorities captured and convicted eight local labor leaders, despite any concrete evidence of their involvement in the incidents. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, and three were pardoned six years later by the governor of Illinois. The bomber was never found.

The Haymarket Affair, as the incident became known, spurred a fresh wave of labor activism around the world, particularly among younger generations of workers. Membership in labor organizations spiked.

The first May Day

Responding to ongoing pressure for an eight-hour day, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) resumed the fight and set May 1, 1890 as the date for a general strike. AFL president Samuel Gompers enlisted the support of European socialist labor leaders, proposing an international day of action to demand a universal eight-hour day.

Workers in countries throughout Europe and America rallied in the streets. The following day, the New York World’s front page was devoted entirely to the event, according to Philip Sheldon Foner, author of May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday.

The headlines proclaimed:

“Parade of Jubilant Workingmen in All the Trade Centers of the Civilized World”

and

“Everywhere the Workmen Join in Demands for a Normal Day”

The Times of London listed 24 European cities where demonstrations had occurred. It also noted events in Cuba, Peru and Chile.

Commemoration of May Day became an annual event, as workers in a growing number of nations each year participated. Today it still retains strong international political significance in a number of countries throughout the world – especially those with socialist or former-socialist governments.

Interestingly, though, America’s observance of May Day became increasingly obsolete in the 20th Century.  In 1894, riots erupted during the longstanding Pullman Strike near Chicago. The incident, in which several workers were killed by federal authorities, drew national attention. Under pressure to appease labor, Congress unanimously voted to approve rush legislation to make Labor Day a national holiday. President Grover Cleveland signed it into law six days after the end of the strike. Eager to distinguish Labor Day from the more radical activities associated with May Day, Cleveland agreed on a September date for the holiday — one that  trade unions had identified a decade earlier as a worker celebration day (separate from May Day).

So what ever became of the eight-hour day?

The American labor effort for the eight-hour day persisted through the turn of the century, with ongoing, and sometimes violent, strikes and demonstrations. Incrementally, though, a number of key industries agreed to adhere to shortened. And in 1916, Congress enacted the Adamson Act, officially establishing the eight-hour work day — the first federal law to regulate the hours of workers in private companies.

Two decades labor, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the maximum workweek at 40 hours for a wide range of industries, it also required employers to pay overtime bonuses.

Check out the following PBS video (in three parts) on the history of the incidents that you can partially thank for your 9 to 5 work schedule:

Haymarket Martyrs–Origin of International Workers Day

class=”wp-media-credit”>Flickr:Miish

When it comes to America’s eclectic patchwork of voting laws, there is certainly no lack of variety. Rules often vary dramatically from one state to another, and voting in some areas is a significantly harder feat than in others.

Take Virginia and West Virginia. While the latter doesn’t require any ID to vote, its neighbor to the east has one of the strictest ID laws in the nation. And while Virginia permanently strips certain types of violent ex-felons from voting, ex-felons in West Virgina convicted of the same exact crimes can regain the right to vote after completion of their parole.

To add to the confusion, a number of states have recently attempted to dramatically change their own rules on voter ID requirements, resulting in a constantly changing set of laws that can often leave voters feeling baffled and unprepared as elections approach (see examples at the bottom).

In February, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a challenge to a provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a landmark law that is widely considered among the most effective and successful pieces of U.S. civil rights legislation. At issue is a provision in the law called Section 5 that applies only to specific parts of the country with a history of discriminatory voting practices. It covers nine states, mainly in the South, plus regions within seven other states (including California). The law requires that all covered areas receive approval from the U.S. Justice Department before implementing any changes to voting laws.

The map below helps sort through the hodgepodge of individual state laws that determine who can vote. We’ve ranked and color-coded each state by the severity of its voting laws (taking voter ID, felon voting, early voting, and Section 5 into account). See the notes below the map for explanations on asterisked states that have recently changed laws, are waiting for federal approval to do so, or just happen to have their own unique rules.

NOTE: All states require an ID for first time voters.

Special state rules

• *Alabama: Photo ID law set to take effect in 2014. Currently, a valid non-photo ID can include a state hunting or fishing license or gun permit.
• *Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington D.C.: Student IDs are no longer accepted.

• *Arkansas: Student ID is typically not accepted, unless it has an address. For voters who don’t have acceptable ID, Arkansas will provide a photo ID free of charge.
• *Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia: For 1st time voters student ID is typically not accepted, unless it has an address.
• *Mississippi: New state amendment requires government-issued photo ID, although the law is still pending (federal government permission required).

• *Missouri:  Although the state has a voter ID law, voters can still cast their ballots if an election judge from each political party vouches for them.

• *Montana, Rhode Island: Both states use signature verification to identify eligibility. If the voter’s signature on the provisional ballot matches the signature on the voter’s registration record, the ballot is counted.

• *New Hampshire: New Hampshire will require government-issued photo IDs after Sept. 1, 2013. The law is being challenged in court by two civil liberties organizations.

• *North Carolina:  State legislators recently proposed 3 new voter measure, including a strict new photo ID law.

• *Pennsylvania: Enacted new photo ID law, but it will not be in effect during the state’s May primary elections. However, voters may be asked by poll workers to present any ID with a valid address, even though they aren’t technically required to.
  
  Sources 
• Brennan Center for Justice
• Department of Justice
• HeadCount
• National Council of State Legislatures

A gas-mask wearing demonstrator during the first Earth Day celebration in 1970. (Associated Press)

 

Happy Earth Day!
To start, a quick quiz:

1. Who said the following quote:

“Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they, more than we, will wreak the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later.”

2. Which organization contributed the most money and support to the first Earth Day?

(Yup, you guessed it: you gotta read the post to find the answers.)

A planetary shout-out

From its scrappy beginnings 43 years ago as an effort to teach the public about America’s environmental crisis, Earth Day has evolved into a major international event. It’s now the largest secular celebration in the world, with millions of activists simultaneously participating in countries around the globe.

Right now the earth needs all the love it can get. But even in the face of today’s catastrophic environmental crises, like climate change and the vast destruction of natural habitats, environmentalism has become a staunchly partisan issue in Washington, where lawmakers repeatedly shy away from legislative action to address very urgent problems. This is evident not only in Congress’ failure to enact any comprehensive legislation on climate change, but also in the alarming number of elected officials who consider the mere suggestion of stricter environmental regulation anathema, a plot to kill jobs and weaken our economy. In fact, many lawmakers now consider the Environmental Protection Agency among the most reviled and distrusted agencies in the federal government. This was evident last year, when several Republican presidential candidates repeatedly called for the agency’s termination.

Have Americans always been so apprehensive about environmental laws and regulations? And has it always been so controversial and partisan?

The first Earth Day

Back in 1970, the environmental outlook was not so shiny either.
After decades of unfettered industrial and economic growth in the absence of strong federal environmental laws, America had managed to majorly muck up its air and water resources. Toxic effluent from factories spilling into streams and rivers was not an uncommon site in industrial areas. Countless open spaces and waterways throughout the country had become dumping grounds, and air pollution was so bad, it frequently left urban areas shrouded in thick blankets of smog.

Consider this timeline of events:

• November 1966: In New York City, 168 people die of respiratory-related illnesses over a 3-day period due largely to horrendous air quality.

• March 1967: Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, announces the first official list of endangered wildlife species in the U.S. 78 animals are named, including the symbol of American itself: the Bald Eagle.

• January 1969: A blowout at an offshore oil rig near Santa Barbara spills upwards of 10,000 gallons of crude oil for 10 days into the Santa Barbara Channel and onto nearby beaches. At the time, it’s considered largest oil spill in American history (sadly, it now ranks third, overtaken by the 1989 Exxon Valdez and 2010 Deepwater Horizon).

• June 1969: A particularly fetid industrial stretch of the Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland bursts into flames (seriously) when oil-soaked debris in the water is ignited by sparks from a passing train.

“If the people really understood that in the lifetime of their children, they’re going to have destroyed the quality of the air and the water all over the world and perhaps made the globe unlivable in a half century, they’d do something about it. But this is not well understood.”

That’s a quote from Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, who spearheaded the first Earth Day organizing effort.

Nelson formed a congressional steering committee, invited California Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey to co-chair it and hired 25-year-old Harvard Law School dropout Denis Hayes to direct the undertaking. Borrowing from the Vietnam War protest model, the mission was to organize environmental teach-ins throughout the nation, all during the course of a single day.

With a very limited budget and no email or internet access (didn’t exist yet), Hayes and his small group of young organizers mailed out thousands of letters to high school and college student body presidents across the nation requesting their participation. The group successfully brought together volunteers in dozens of cities and college campuses to organize local events.

Denis Hayes in the Earth Day campaign office (Associated Press)

The Earth Day organizing effort caught on like “gangbusters,” said Nelson.
On November 30, 1969, the New York Times reported: “Rising concern about the ‘environmental crisis’ is sweeping the nations campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam.”

Hayes, who was interviewed in the recent PBS documentary Earth Days, recalls the sentiment:

“Lord knows what we thought we were doing. It was wild and exciting and out of control and the sort of thing that lets you know you’ve really got something big happening … What we were trying to do was create a brand new public consciousness that would cause the rules of the game to change.”

 

In all, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, marking the single largest demonstration in U.S. history.

Recalls Hayes: “It was a huge high adrenaline effort that in the end genuinely changed things. Before (that), there were people that opposed freeways, people that opposed clear-cutting, or people worried about pesticides, (but) they didn’t think of themselves as having anything in common. After Earth Day they were all part of an environmental movement.”

A rally in Philadelphia as part of the first Earth Day celebration (AP)

And that brings us to the second question of the quiz: The group that was most supportive – financially and otherwise – of the first Earth Day organizing effort was the United Auto Workers.

An organization not generally known for championing environmental causes, the UAW donated money, provided volunteers across the country, and paid the printing costs of promotional materials.

UAW President Walter Reuther pledged his organization’s full support for Earth Day and for subsequent environmental legislation.

In one speech, he said:

“The labor movement is about that problem we face tomorrow morning. Damn right! But to make that the sole purpose of the labor movement is to miss the main target. I mean, what good is a dollar an hour more in wages if your neighborhood is burning down? What good is another week’s vacation if the lake you used to go to is polluted and you can’t swim in it and the kids can’t play in it? What good is another $100 in pension if the world goes up in atomic smoke?”

UAW-sponsored flier

Soon thereafter, General Motors’ president Edward Cole promised “pollution free” cars by 1980 (that didn’t quite pan out).

The era of environmental regulation

Before we get to that, here’s the answer to the first question of our little quiz. The quote was by none other than (drum roll, please):
President Richard Nixon … during his State of the Union address in 1970.

Yes, that Nixon, best remembered as the conservative Republican who appealed to the “silent majority,” prolonged America’s involvement in Vietnam, and resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal.

Nixon, however, also oversaw and approved the most sweeping environmental regulations in the history of our nation – the very ones responsible, in part, for the fresh air and clean water we enjoy today.

Even before the first Earth Day, Congress and the president began taking action. On January 1, 1970, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which among other things, required environmental impact statements for major new projects and developments.

Environmentalism had never been one of Nixon’s big political priorities, but his administration recognized the growing media attention and public pressure around the issue. In other words, he realized that pushing forward strong environmental regulation was, at that point, a prudent political move.

Three months later, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

By the end of 1970, he had signed an extension of the Clean Air Act. Now considered the single most important piece of air pollution legislation in American history, it required the newly formed EPA to create and enforce regulations on airborne pollution known to be hazardous to human health, and, among other things, led to the universal installation of catalytic converters in cars.

By the end of 1972, the Clean Water Act, the Pesticide Control Act (which banned DDT), and the Marine Mammal Protection Act had all been signed into law by Nixon. A year later, he signed the Endangered Species Act and soon thereafter the Safe Water Drinking Act.

Most of these bills were approved with bipartisan support in Congress, some almost unanimously.

In a televised speech in 1972 Nixon said:

“I have sent to Congress today a sweeping set of proposals to clean up our nation’s air and water. This is the most far reaching and comprehensive message on conservation and restoration of our natural resources ever submitted to the Congress by the President of the United States. We are taking these actions not in some distant future, but now, because we know that it is now or never.”

By and large, the regulations worked. Environmental conditions vastly improved. America had been on the brink of ecological disaster, and we did something about it while we still had the chance.

The next decade — through the presidencies of Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter — was somewhat of a heyday for environmentalism in America. Which is not to say that there weren’t strong voices of opposition and major lingering environmental problems. Nonetheless, during this era legislators on both sides of the aisle agreed that protecting the environment simply made the most sense.

In 1979, just before the price of a barrel of oil hit $30, President Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof in support of his Federal Solar Research Institute. He said: “We must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources.”

 The end of the green honeymoon

And then, with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980, the environmental honeymoon came to a swift conclusion. By the end of the first year of his presidency, Reagan had issued an executive order giving the Office of Management and Budget (OMB ) the power to regulate environmental proposals before they became public. He also cut the EPA’s budget by almost half. In his second term as president, Reagan even took the symbolic action of dismantling the solar panels on the White House roof.

And since then, a unified political drive to protect the environment has never quite been revived.

The benefit of tangible problems

Organizers of the first Earth Day had a key advantage: the problems they were trying to tackle were clearly visible and impacted everyday life. Kids couldn’t swim in public lakes and rivers because they were too polluted; parks and open spaces were strewn with trash; people were getting poisoned by pollution in the air. And because of those very tangible problems, there was a clear and urgent connection made between environmental policies and quality of life.

Today, many of the issues at play are perhaps even more threatening – on a global scale – but also more abstract. The idea, for instance, that human action can be the cause of a couple of degrees increase in the global temperature, and that in turn can cause massive disasters is a much harder idea to convey to people who haven’t yet felt the impact.

Interestingly, though, in the wake of the many natural disasters that swept through the U.S. in 2012, the percentage of Americans who said they believed in the concept of climate change has risen slightly. And in his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama broke his long-held silence on the issue and urged Congress to begin to address the problem.

This minor shift in public opinion has clearly not been enough yet to inspire any substantive legislative action in Washington. But it does suggest that when faced with the threat of environmental disaster, Americans grow more willing to accept the idea of regulation. That’s at least, what led to major changes in the 1970s.

What degree of environmental degradation will be powerful enough to inspire real change today?

Beneath the presentation is a diagram by the NY Times illustrating the various outcomes of the case.

Note: the presentation is best viewed in full-screen mode; use the arrows to advance and zoom in/out on any text or image

Possible outcomes

Source: New York Times. Click to view original image.

On March 20, 2003 U.S. forces invaded Iraq under the false pretense that its government was harboring weapons of mass destruction. Intended to be a brief mission to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime and find the weapons, the Defense Department estimated the effort would cost about $60 billion.  Today, 10 years later, Iraq is still reeling from a prolonged conflict that, according to a recent study, has cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion (and growing) and brought a death toll of nearly 190,000 civilians, soldiers, journalists and aid workers.

While the U.S. occupation did lead to the overthrow of Hussein and the semblance of a fragile democracy, it also launched the country into a state of civil war, fueled by an ongoing period of political instability and intense sectarian violence. The U.S. occupation officially ended in December of 2011, but today the bloodshed continues on a nearly daily basis as large swaths of Iraq remain mired in conflict.

This collection of visualizations illustrates some of the war’s cold hard facts, the big milestones, and the many layers of miscalculation and deception.

1. By the numbers: charting an expensive, bloody decade

This infographic, produced by The Guardian, details the high rate of fatalities and expenses associated with the Iraq War. Use the tool below to zoom in on details.

2. A chronology of war

Produced by the Council on Foreign Relations this timeline documents the major milestones of the War in Iraq, from the initial invasion on March 20, 2003 to the final exit of U.S. troops on Dec. 18, 2011.

3. Counting the fallen

Total deaths

A recently released report from Brown University’s Costs of War project, estimates that close to 190,000 people have died in Iraq since the war effort began. That includes close to 4,500 U.S. troops and upwards of  134,000 Iraqi civilians (about 70 percent of all deaths).

Source: Costs of War project

Using data from Wikileaks, the Guardian in 2010 created this interactive map detailing every recorded death in Iraq between 2004 and 2009.

U.S. soldiers deaths

This interactive, produced by CNN, shows the nearly 4,500 fatalities of U.S. armed forces in Iraq, with details on each soldier’s hometown and place of death in Iraq.

4. The tab

When the Iraq War began, the Defense Department anticipated that the effort would cost about $60 billion. While the U.S. price tag still remains a matter of speculation, even the most conservative estimates now place it at well over $1 trillion. The recent Brown University study estimates the current tab at around $2 trillion, and predicts it will eventually reach $6 trillion when accounting for residual expenses .

This animation, produced by Good Magazine – which places the current U.S. tab at a figure higher than most other estimates – details the elements that made the war so costly.

5. The spin and its deadly consequences

The U.S. invaded Iraq on the false stipulation that it had weapons of mass destruction. A mix of faulty intelligence and deception from the highest ranks of government resulted in an occupation that lasted longer than World War II. The first visualization below, by the Center for Public Integrity,  highlights the false statements made by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion. The subsequent interactive, produced by the left-leaning Mother Jones Magazine details the many layers of deception that led us into Iraq.

Center for Public Integrity

Source: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Gun control advocates say yes. Gun rights folks beg to differ.

Big surprise on that one, huh?

Source: Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, an advocacy group pushing for tougher regulations, assigned every state a grade based on 29 different policy approaches to regulating firearms and ammunition. California topped the list with an  A-. (New York – which now requires background checks for ammunition sales – has since surpassed California in the toughness of it’s gun laws. It’s the first state to enact such legislation following the Newtown shooting. And debates have begun in a handful of other states – including California and Colorado – to strengthen gun laws there.)

The Center points to 2010 statistics showing that seven out of 10 states with the strictest regulations also had that lowest gun homicide rates.

Click on image to explore interactively. Source: Guardian

But gun rights advocates opposed to tighter regulations argue that this correlation is inconclusive and misleading. A common counter argument is that stricter regulations don’t do anything to prevent  criminals from getting a hold of guns -  they just prevent law abiding citizens from being able to protect themselves. Many also point to states like Maine, which has some of the loosest regulations in the country (it received an F grade by gun control groups,  but also has among the lowest gun homicide rates in the country). On the contrary, they argue, the strict gun laws in cities like Chicago and Washington D.C. have  failed to prevent those rising homicide rates in those places.

“The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens and they’ve essentially made the citizens prey,” Richard A. Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association told the NY Times.

California vs. South Dakota: the toughest and loosest gun laws

Despite its  relatively low rate of gun homicides, South Dakota got smacked with an F grade by the Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which identified it as the state with the nation’s weakest gun laws. Here’s how the two states compare:.

99 ways states have loosened gun laws

Mother Jones magazine tracked 99 state laws passed since 2009 that have made guns easier to own and carry in public, and harder for the government to track. According to the report, these laws were pushed through by the National Rifle Association and allies in state capitols. More than two-thirds of them were passed by Republican-controlled legislatures, though often with bipartisan support.

Mother Jones highlighted some of the more striking laws it came across:

• Bullets and booze: In Missouri, law-abiding citizens can carry a gun while intoxicated and even fire it if “acting in self-defense.”
• Child-safety lock off: In Kansas, permit holders can carry concealed weapons inside K-12 schools and at school-sponsored activities.
• Short arm of the law: In Utah, a person under felony indictment can buy a gun, and a person charged with a violent crime may be able to retain a concealed weapon permit. Nebraskans who’ve pled guilty to a violent crime can get a permit to carry a gun.
• Sweet Jesus! In Louisiana, permit holders can carry concealed weapons inside houses of worship.
• Without a trace: Virginia not only repealed a law requiring handgun vendors to submit sales records, but the state also ordered the destruction of all such previous records.

The big players in the debate

President Barack Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner, gives his 2013 State of the Union address. (Charles Dharapak-Pool/Getty Images)

So, what did the big guy actually say? These four multimedia resources help sort through the nitty gritty of the president’s speech.

A breakdown of the 12 big policy goals

The highlights: an annotated multimedia presentation

As they did with Obama’s inauguration address, the New York Times has created a great annotated version of the speech, allowing reader to click on the various speech highlights, watch corresponding clips from the address, and read further commentary.

Fact-checking the president

So, was everything he said true? Politico offers an interesting multimedia analysis, with specific clips from the speech and commentary as to the accuracy of the president’s statements.

The words, visualized

How do the president’s words look as a visualization? This interactive, created by Dmitry Paranyushkin from Nodus Labs, uses text network analysis tool Textexture to show us the the most prominent concepts inside the text and the relationship between the words used. Words are represented as nodes and the closer they occur next to each other within the text of the speech, the more interconnected they are in the network. Clusters, created by certain words appearing more often next to each other than in the rest of the vocabulary used, indicate distinct topics in Obama’s speech. Kind of weird – but definitely worth a look.

(Click here to view the timeline in full screen mode)

More on the gun control debate

For a primer on the debate over firearms, scroll the following interactive produced by the Associated Press, with multimedia analyses of the issues, the players, the terminology and public opinion.

That controversial cartoon we mentioned …

The following cartoon, produced by the creators of South Park, was featured in Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary film Bowling for Columbine. It presents a satirical perspective on America’s infatuation with guns, and has an obvious political bent. It does not represent the ideas or opinions of KQED, but is worth viewing to encourage debate on the issues it raises.