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)

A roadside sign just north of the Tijuana border crossing. (Credit: Flickr/Jonathon Mcintosh)

What’s the plan for America’s 11.1 million undocumented immigrants?

It’s the million dollar question, and the most divisive element of the Senate’s sprawling new effort to overhaul the country’s messy immigration system. After months of painstaking negotiation, a bipartisan group of senators, known as the “Gang of Eight”, recently unveiled a proposal to — among other things — create a path to citizenship for the millions who live here in the shadows. But legislators have made abundantly clear that this proposal is a far cry from “amnesty”. The path they outlined for almost all the undocumented (except for young “DREAMers” who would be on a streamlined 5-year path) is a tedious, decade-plus-long process full of steep hurdles and strict conditions, in which citizenship is a distant destination at the end of a long journey.

Where do the undocumented live?

The following map, produced by the online magazine Slate, uses the most recent Pew Research Center analysis of 2011 data, which includes state-by-state estimates. Slate notes that the data meets the 90-percent confidence interval for population estimates for each state (except for the handful of states where the undocumented immigrant population is so low that it’s nearly impossible to confidently estimate).

Many more undocumented immigrants reside in California (topping 2.5 million) and Texas  (more than 1.5 million)  than any other state, according to Pew data. However, Nevada has the largest proportion of undocumented immigrants—7.2 percent of the state population and nearly 10 percent of its workforce.

Mouse over each state to see the estimated number of undocumented immigrants living there, what percentage of the total state population and workforce they make up, and how the number of undocumented immigrants has changed over the past two decades.

Editor’s note: since production of the map, most media organizations have begun referring to this population as “undocumented” rather than ‘illegal” immigrants.

What else do we know about undocumented immigrants in the U.S.?

• The population has actually gone down quite a bit since 2007, when it spiked at about 12 million, according to Pew. The decrease is due largely to the U.S. recession and increased border enforcement and deportations, with the rate of undocumented immigration from Mexico falling the most.
• Mexicans made up close to 60 percent of all undocumented residents, according to a Pew analysis of the 2010 population. DHS estimates that in 2011, 70 percent of this population came from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador.
• Today’s estimated 11.1 million undocumented immigrants make up less than a third of all foreign-born residents in the U.S. Roughly 40 to 50 percent of the undocumented entered the country legally and overstayed their visas, according to a Pew 2006 analysis. And although about 1.6 million of the total undocumented population today arrived within in the last years , the majority of the current population has lived here for at least a decade, reports the Department of Homeland Security reports.

So how do we know all this?

Counting America’s undocumented population is a true exercise in estimation. Pew, a non-partisan public policy group, came up with the latest 11.1 million figure (for 2011) primarily by analyzing census data, which provides a measure of the total immigrant population (both legal and undocumented). Pew then analyzed a variety of other government data sources – including DHS – to estimate the number of legal immigrants (green card holders and refugees) and then subtracted this figure from the total number of immigrants. Of course, a lot more statistical wizardry goes into the calculation (as described here) but this is the basic framework for its estimation.

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

PBS

Remember that “binders full of women” comment made by Mitt Romney in the second presidential debate last October?

That infamous blunder – the subject of countless tweets and memes – was in response to a question about gender wage disparities, an issue that still receives relatively little political attention despite its prevalence.

Although earnings rates have gradually narrowed since the Equal Pay Act was signed into law 50 years ago, the gap is still significant: in 2010, female full-time workers made only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, as calculated by the National Women’s Law Center (which used 2011 U.S. Census American Community Survey data). That year, the median (middle) wage for full-time male workers was $48,202. And for women: $37,118.

The earning gap between men and women is narrowest for younger workers and grows consistently wider for older workers.  

Women make up about half of the U.S. workforce and are the main breadwinners in roughly 4 out of 10 households, according to NWLC. Today women also earn more college and graduate school degrees than men do. Yet, on average, women earn less than men in almost every occupation for which there is sufficient wage data.

Why?

The reasons behind the gap are still hotly contested. Some academic studies argue that the disparity is due mainly to non-discriminatory factors involving a division of labor in the home — including childcare — that often falls more heavily on women. Because of family-related circumstances, women are also more likely than men to have interrupted careers and to work part-time, both of which generally result in lower wages. Additionally, women still tend to be employed in a greater number of “helping” and support professions that are often compensated at lower rates than jobs that are still more typically performed by men.

However, many studies point to evidence that the gender wage gap still persists even after these expected factors like family leave are taken into account, leading to the conclusion that systemic discrimination is still a primary factor in explaining the disparity.

Republicans in Congress recently blocked a House vote on legislation known as the Paycheck Fairness Act. The bill, which has been introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) in the last eight consecutive congresses, would expand the Equal Pay Act to close specific loopholes and allow employees to share salary information with their coworkers. It would also require employers to demonstrate that pay disparities between male and female employees are based on job performance, not gender.

Wage Gap by State

Click on each state in the map below to see what a woman makes for every dollar a man makes (the ratio of female and male median earnings for full-time, year-round workers). The “wage gap” is the additional money a woman would have to make for every dollar made by a man in order to have equal annual earnings. The map uses data collected by NWLC. Download the data here.

Leading the pack in 2011 was Washington D.C., where full-time female workers made, on average, 90.4 cents for every dollar that full-time male workers made. In California, which ranked fourth, women made 84.9 cents for every dollar made by men. At the bottom of the list was Wyoming, where women made a mere 66.6 cents for every dollar men made.

How has the wage gap changed over time?

Although the pay gap between men and women remains fairly wide, it has narrowed significantly over the last half century. When the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, the median wage for a woman working full time, year round was about $22,000, as compared to roughly $37,000 for men (or 59 cents for every dollar a man made).  By 1973, women, on average, made only 57 cents to every dollar made by men, a gap of 43 cents, the widest since the Census Bureau began tracking earnings. Since then, the gap has gradually narrowed, although it’s remained fairly stagnant for the past decade.

NWLC also has created charts listing the wider wage gap that exists between African-American and Latino women over time, as compared to white males.

Gender Wage Gap by Race/Ethnic Group

Although the gender wage gap among whites and Asians is greater than among African Americans and Latinos, it should be noted that African-American and Latino men and women both make significantly less overall than their white counterparts. In 2012, Asian women full-time wage and salary workers had higher median weekly earnings than women of all other races/ethnicities, as well as African-American and Latino men.

The current pay gap grows significantly wider when comparing average annual wages made by women of color to those made by white men. For instance,  African-American women working full time, year round were paid only 64 cents, and Hispanic women only 55 cents, for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, according to NWLC.

Mouse over the following chart, produced by Catalyst, to explore the data.

Pay Gap by Profession

Even within the same professions, women today are still paid significantly less, on average, than men. But the pay gap varies dramatically for different jobs. That’s according to an analysis that NPR’s Planet Money did of the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The chart below, by Lam Thuy Vo, shows the jobs where the wage gap is the smallest and the biggest (based on comparisons of full-time workers).

Part of the gap in pay, Vo notes, results from professional decisions some women make voluntarily, even within some individual job categories. She writes: “Among physicians, for example, women are more likely than men to choose lower-paid specialties (though this does not explain all of the pay gap among doctors).”

It’s also interesting to note, writes Vo, that the jobs where the gap is biggest are the one’s that pay more, on average, than the jobs where the gap is lowest.

Percentages are based on the median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers. Not all jobs have enough workers for BLS to calculate a meaningful ratio.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The last time the Supreme Court took up a case on marriage equality was 46 years ago when about one-third of all states in the country still had laws that banned people of different races from marrying each other. This week all eyes are on the High Court as it prepares to hear oral arguments on two cases related to same-sex marriage. At issue is whether gay marriage bans violate the rights those couples have to equal treatment under the law, as guaranteed by the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. The Court’s rulings on both cases – expected by June – will likely be considered landmark decisions, ones that could potentially result in a dramatic widening of marriage rights for same-sex couples throughout the country … or a preservation of the status quo. The issue, though, harkens back to another, often forgotten, landmark civil rights decision from 1967 that similarly addressed marriage equality and the concept of equal protection of the law,  long before the notion of legalized same-sex marriage was considered even a remote possibility. Appropriately titled Loving v. Virginia, the case before the Court concerned the fate of its two plaintiffs: a black woman and a white man who had married each other in Washington D.C., but lived in Virginia, one of almost 20 mostly southern states in the late 1950s that still enforced anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting whites from marrying people of color. (Virginia, it turns out, hasn’t always been for all lovers.) In a unanimous decision, the Court ruled that such bans were in violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, ending the last piece of explicitly legalized segregation in America.

The plaintiffs

In 1958 Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in Washington D.C. Upon retuning shortly thereafter to Virginia, police raided their home in the middle of the night, arresting the couple on felony charges for breaking the state’s anti-miscegenation law, known as the Racial Integrity Act, which made it a criminal act for any white person to marry any person of color. In January 1959, the two –- a bricklayer and a homemaker — pled guilty in state court. A trial judge sentenced them both to one year in prison, suspending the sentence on condition that they leave the state and not return for 25 years. In considering his verdict, the judge wrote:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

The Lovings moved to Washington D.C., where their union was legally recognized. They had no intention of becoming activists, but longed to return to Virginia. In 1964, as Congress debated passage of the Civil Rights Act, Mildred Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking if the new law could help them. They were referred to the American Civil Liberties Union, who took up the case, filing suit in federal court against the State of Virginia. Three years later, after several appeals, the case reached the Supreme Court.

Anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Almost every state in the country has had some form of anti-miscegenation law in its history. By the end of World War II, about 40 states still had active anti-miscegenation laws on the books, including California. In 1948, the California Supreme Court ruled In Perez v. Sharp that the state’s anti-miscegenation statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It became the first state since Ohio in 1887 to repeal its anti-miscegenation law. Throughout the 1950s, numerous other states followed California’s lead, and by the start of the Loving’s Supreme Court case, the remaining 16 holdouts were almost all in the South.

The Court’s Ruling

The Court unanimously overturned Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, rejecting the state’s defense that the statute applied equally to both blacks and whites. It held that drawing distinctions based on race were generally “odious to a free people,” and should therefore be subject to “the most rigid scrutiny” under the Equal Protection Clause. The Virginia law, the Court stated, had no legitimate purpose except blatant racial discrimination as “measures designed to maintain white supremacy.” Delivering the opinion of the Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. … To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

The decision effectively overturned all state laws that prohibited any kind of interracial marriage. In several states, though, some of the statutes remained on the books, even though they were no longer legally enforceable. Alabama in 2000 was the last state to officially remove an anti-miscegenation provision from its state constitution. The ballot measure passed by a 60 percent margin. But nearly 526,000 people voted to keep the provision in place. In 2007, on the 40^th anniversary of her Supreme Court case, Mildred Loving – who died the following year at age 68 – mentioned same-sex marriage in reference to the ongoing struggle for imarriage equality:

I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry… I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

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

Photo by: Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk

In our hyper-connected world, where success is often measured by the number of “followers” and “friends” we have, becoming pope is pretty much the holy grail.

I mean, think about it: you become pope, and just like that, you’ve got 1.2 billion followers. Take that Twitter!

That’s about how many Roman Catholics there are in the world today, according to Vatican figures. That’s more than 1 in 7 people on the planet who subscribe to the belief that the pope is one of the closest mortals to God. And it makes the papacy an incredibly powerful global force.

Among those ranks, a steadily growing majority live in the global south, more than 40 percent of whom hail from Latin America. Brazil has the largest Catholic population in the world, and three other Latin American countries are in the top 10, according to the the World Christian Database (as reported by the BBC). Roughly three-quarters of Latin America’s entire population — about 483 million — is now Catholic.

Click through the map below – produced by The Globe and Mail, using 2010 data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life – to find the size of each country’s Catholic population as a percentage of its overall population.

So it wasn’t mere coincidence that the College of Cardinals on Wednesday chose Jose Mario Bergoglio of Argentina to be the church’s first Latin American leader and its only non-European pope in more than 1,200 years. In electing Pope Francis – as he’s now known – the cardinals made a statement that the future of the Catholic Church is based in the global south.

“As you know, the duty of the conclave was to appoint a bishop of Rome,” the newly anointed pope said from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as throngs of ecstatic followers cheered below. “And it seems to me that my brother cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth to find one. But here I am.”

Born to Italian immigrant parents and raised in Buenos Aires, Pope Francis – a Jesuit – is not likely to lead the church in any radically different philosophical direction from his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The two leaders are both conservative and fairly consistent in their opposition to divisive social issues like birth control and homosexuality.

Nevertheless, Pope Francis’ ascendancy marks a major turning point in the trajectory of the church, an acknowledgement that the demographics of its congregants have changed dramatically over the last century, and even in the past several decades.

In 1910, 65 percent of Catholics were European, 24 percent were from Latin America and the Caribbean, and less than 1 percent were from Africa, according to the Pew Forum. A century later, in 2010, only about 24 percent of Catholics were Europeans, while roughly 40 percent were Latin American. Africa, meanwhile, now has the fastest growing Catholic population in the world – rising from 45 million in 1970 to 176 million in 2012 – with Asia a close second.

Source: Factcheck.org

Compared to other high-income nations in the world, America isn’t unusually violent; we’re just unusually lethal.

That’s according to David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. He argues there is a direct connection between the U.S. being leaps and bounds ahead of any other industrialized country in terms of overall gun death rates and gun homicides — and the fact that we have the highest gun-ownership rates in the world

“We are a nation which does not have more crime or more violence,” Hemenway said during a forum on gun violence held shortly after the Newtown shooting. “We are an average nation in terms of assault, robbery, and (non-firearms) homicides.” What distinguishes the U.S., he notes, is our rate of gun violence: “The United States has a very horrific gun problem … 85 people a day dying from guns from all sorts of injury … Compared to the other developed countries, we are just doing terribly.”

Below are a handful of particularly striking gun homicide stats, based on 2010 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scroll over the charts below for additional information.

*Note that stats on gun deaths vary depending on which government agency is reporting them.

The U.S. gun murder rate — which is now actually at its lowest level since the early 1980′s — is still more than double that of any other wealthy nation in the world.

Hemenway notes that a child in the U.S is about 13 times more likely to be a victim of a firearm-related homicide than children in most other industrialized nations.

Firearms were the third leading cause of injury-related deaths nationwide in 2010, following poisoning and motor vehicle accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For the sake of comparison, in 2010 there were more than twice as many firearms deaths in the U.S. than terrorism-related deaths worldwide.

The following visualization, produced by Periscopic, uses data from the F.B.I’s Uniform Crime Report (which reported 9,595 homicides for 2010, but did not include data from Florida and Alabama), in an attempt to calculate the years of life stolen from gun murder victims. Each strand in the graph below represents a person killed by gun violence. Visit their site to explore the data by sex, age group and region.

This map, produced by NBC News as part of its gun violence series, provides a sobering look at all the gun-related deaths (homicides, suicides, and accidental) that occurred over this year’s  Martin Luther King holiday weekend. Click on the image to view the map interactively on NBC’s site. Below that is a clip reporting the various instances of gun homicides over the course of that one bloody weekend.

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