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Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid insist gun control legislation is not dead — they say they're strategizing on how to bring the issue back to the Senate floor.

Even if it does return, one proposal unlikely to survive is an assault-weapons ban. Military-style assault rifles now form a nearly $1 billion industry supported by gun owners who spend thousands of dollars collecting these firearms.

And while the gun-rights lobby keeps invoking the right of "self-defense" to defend Americans' right to buy these guns, home protection is low on the list of reasons gun enthusiasts keep buying military-style weapons.

'They Picture You As Some Kind Of Militant Freak'

There's a lot of name-calling in the gun control debate. Gun control advocates are slammed as the elitist, urban liberals who want to take everyone's guns away. Gun rights people are accused of being paranoid rednecks who think the government is out to get them. And then there are the special labels reserved for people who love their assault rifles.

"You know, they picture you as some kind of militant freak. And that's not me," says Mike Collins, who owns more than a dozen military-style rifles with his wife.

Collins wants you to understand something: He is a rational, intelligent, regular guy.

"I spent 27 years in the military," he says. "I defended this country all over the world. I've been in multiple combat tours. I'm not a nut. I'm not a crazy guy. I'm just a normal person who enjoys shooting."

And for Collins, target-practicing with an AR-15 is a hobby.

Next to Collins at the shooting range at Clark Brothers Gun Shop in Warrenton, Va., is Jason Glascock, who says if more Americans knew what it was like to shoot these weapons, they would see these guns can actually be good, clean fun.

"The AR — it's America's gun. It's what our troops carry. It's been our military firearm," Glascock says. "It's our, if you will, symbol around the world, this gun."

The fully automatic version of this gun — the M-16 — was introduced by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The AR-15 is semiautomatic, which means you need to squeeze the trigger for each bullet.

Glascock was 3 years old when he started shooting a .22 caliber with his grandfather. By 5 years old, he moved on to shotguns. He started collecting military-style guns when he turned 18, and he just built an AR-15 for his 19-year-old son last Christmas.

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Kane has written two books of poetry, which both deal with issues of displacement and cultural identity, and is currently working on a novel based on the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. She tells NPR's Melissa Block about the island, her Inupiat identity and the upcoming trip.

The national debate over immigration reform may be churning on in Washington, D.C., but there's one policy a growing number of states can agree on: driver's licenses for unauthorized immigrants.

Vermont, Connecticut and Colorado passed new laws this month allowing drivers without Social Security numbers to receive licenses or authorization cards. They join Nevada, Maryland, and Oregon, whose governors signed similar laws in May. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn started the trend this year when he signed Senate Bill 957 in January.

The recent wave of state laws reflect an about-face in policy after 9/11, when states tended to enact more restrictive licensing requirements.

In recent years, unauthorized immigrants have been able to receive driver's licenses in Washington state and New Mexico, and in Utah, drivers who cannot "establish legal/lawful presence" have been able to apply for driving privilege cards, according to the Utah Driver License Division's website.

The types of licenses that unauthorized immigrants can receive vary by state. Nevada's law follows Utah's model by only allowing driver's privilege cards. Such limitations prevent unauthorized immigrants from using the cards as valid government-issued identification.

These new state laws show that the public safety argument often cited by immigrant advocates is "starting to carry weight," says Ann Morse, who directs the National Conference of State Legislatures' Immigrant Policy Project.

As The Economist recently reported:

...unlicensed drivers are almost five times more likely to be in a fatal crash. They are also less likely to stay at accident scenes, according to Yale Law School's Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization. The costs of accidents involving the uninsured are passed on to other motorists in the form of higher insurance premiums.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule this week on a case that may shake up race-conscious admissions in higher education. The justices could change the shape of affirmative action or even strike it down altogether.

California is one of eight states that have already scrapped affirmative action. That means state schools can no longer consider the race of its applicants. At the University of California, Los Angeles, the change has been messy, ambiguous — and sometimes a little ugly.

After the state passed the ban in 1996, the percentages of black and Latino students at UCLA quickly began to fall. Things came to a head in 2006. That year, in a freshman class of nearly 5,000 students, just 96 were African-American.

Corey Matthews — one of the "Infamous 96," as those students came to be known — said it shaped his experience at the huge school. Even in lecture halls filled with hundreds of students, he says, he was often the only African-American student.

UCLA realized there was a problem, so it decided to start something called "holistic review," taking into consideration a wide range of factors in its admissions decisions — from GPA, to family income, to whether an applicant was the first in the family to go to college. Race was not one of the factors, but indeed, the percentages of black and Latino students began to rebound.

Then things got complicated again.

Last year, a UCLA professor released a study claiming the school was letting some black and Latino students in at higher rates than white or Asian students who should have ranked just the same under the new holistic review.

In other words, the study said, UCLA was breaking California law and instituting affirmative action.

UCLA's newspaper, Daily Bruin, published a story on the study and ran an opinion piece suggesting the school re-evaluate its admissions policy.

In response, student groups led rallies to protest the study and the Daily Bruin. They said a reference in an op-ed to an "undue percentage" of minority students was offensive and minimized those students' hard work.

"The reaction was not pretty," James Barragan, the paper's editor in chief, tells NPR's Rachel Martin.

"I got a long email calling me an embarrassment to my race because I wasn't supporting the cause," he says.

Barragan, who has a Latino background, says he agrees that the goal should be to get more racial diversity on campus — but only if it is done fairly.

"We feared at the paper, once we saw the study, that this diversity was coming at a cost of other students who were also qualified to be there and maybe weren't getting the same opportunity," he said.

UCLA says it stands by its admissions policy and points to a review by faculty that refutes the study's findings. A school spokesperson told NPR that UCLA's holistic review is not only legal, but also a fairer and more equitable way to evaluate applicants in an increasingly diverse state.

If the Supreme Court finds affirmative action unconstitutional this week, a lot of schools could wind up facing the same dilemma UCLA has dealt with for nearly two decades.