If you’ve been following the recent debate over the president’s proposal to require universal background checks for gun transactions, you’re familiar with the “40 percent” statistic. Proponents assert that up to 40 percent of gun sales do not involve a federally licensed dealer and therefore are exempt from the current federal requirement for a background check of buyers. Opponents have been attacking this statistic, saying it’s far too high.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians are branded as criminals for committing offenses as minor as fishing without a license or driving with an expired license tag. They lose wages while they spend time in court. Employers lose out when their employees miss work.

Health and education continue to be India's Achilles heel. Only through improving these services for the bulk of the population will it be able to get rid of mass poverty. India has the largest concentration of poor people in the world. The 12th Five-Year Plan figures show poverty declining from 45 per cent of the national population in 1993-94 to 37 per cent in 2004-05, at 0.8 percent per year, slower than the rate of population growth.

When David Steinberg founded the nation’s first gun-control lobby — the long-forgotten National Committee for a Responsible Firearms Policy — he was spurred by more than the shooting of an unarmed teen in his northern Virginia neighborhood.