The shootings of 20 young children and six adult workers last month at a Connecticut elementary school has revived debate not only over gun control, but also over whether the holders of handgun permits should be identified publicly.

The fiercely contested question of confidentiality for handgun permit holders arose last month after the shooting in New York's Lower Hudson Valley published the names of local gun owners. The newspaper, the Journal News, based in Nyack, N.Y., reportedly had to hire armed guards because of the outpouring of anger that greeted publication of its map.

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The newspaper acted after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown on Dec. 14, which also claimed the lives of the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, and his mother, spurring new activism for gun control. It was able to get the information through the state's freedom of information, or FOI, laws.

The same information isn't available in Connecticut, because that data is exempt from state FOI law. But after the Newtown massacre, Democratic state Rep. Stephen Dargan introduced a bill to change that. His measure, which has yet to receive its first hearing, would make the names and addresses of about 170,000 handgun permit holders in the state available to the general public, NBC 30 of Hartford reported.

NBCConnecticut: Lawmaker proposes publicizing gun owners' names

"Most things are FOI-able now," Dargan told the Hartford Courant this week. "I don't know why a responsible gun owner is worried about whether a permit for a revolver is FOI-able or not."

If you're wondering whether you can get hold of such information in your state, chances are you can't.

Under a federal law, the FBI conducts an instant background check on prospective gun buyers for federally licensed dealers to make sure the buyers don't have criminal records or are otherwise ineligible. But how the states handle that information once a sale has been approved is all over the map. 

Most states collect the background information from dealers and require a separate state permit to own the weapon. But most of them don't make the information publicly available. 

A survey of the gun registration and permitting in all 50 states by NBC News indicates that 39 of them shield background information, permits and registrations from public inspection, with exceptions for law enforcement and other official agencies. Nine others make the data public or have no laws addressing confidentiality.

In Florida and Illinois, concealed-weapons debate lays bare the politics of gun control

The issue is moot in Vermont, which doesn't require a permit to carry a weapon, and in Nevada, where the picture is unclear.

Nevada state law declares that the identities of applicants for permits are confidential, but in 2010, the state Supreme Court struck down part of the law, ruling that the identity of permit holder should be an open public record once the permit has been issued.

Here's a state-by-state breakdown:

CONFIDENTIAL
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas (.pdf), Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii (.pdf), Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky (.pdf), Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey (.pdf), New Mexico (.pdf), North Dakota (.pdf), Ohio (limited exceptions for journalists), Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming

GENERALLY OPEN OR NO LAW
California, Iowa, Mississippi (45 days after issuance of permit), Montana, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, West Virginia

After a bloody 2012, some in Congress are seeking to centralize records on gun owners nationwide — Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, has proposed legislation that would create a national gun registry, collecting IDs, photos and fingerprints of owners of most legal weapons.

Her proposal says nothing about making the registry public.

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We've seen them in the movies, but now we can read the real-life history of America's nuclear warriors, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, known as NEST. The story of NEST, which would protect the U.S. in the case of an attempt at nuclear extortion or terrorism, is told in declassified documents published Tuesday.

The 69 documents, released under the federal Freedom of Information Act, were published by the National Security Archive, a respected research organization at George Washington University. (More about the National Security Archive.)

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They tell the story of MIGHTY DERRINGER, a training exercise in 1986 in which NEST attempted to find a nuclear device smuggled into Indianapolis. In the training scenario, the device was detonated, destroying 20 blocks of downtown Indianapolis. 

The archive said the documents "offer the first detailed public look at the inner workings of the agencies, military units and other U.S. entities responsible for protecting the country from a terrorist nuclear attack."

And they reveal problems that can arise in coordinating the many organizations that would respond to such an attack: problems of bomb detection, interagency coordination, containment of contamination and general "confusion." 

"While the MIGHTY DERRINGER exercise and resulting documents are over two decades old," the archive said, "the institutions participating in the exercise retain their roles today, and the issues confronting them in 1986 are similar to the ones that they would face in responding to a nuclear threat in 2012 (and beyond)."

 You can read all 69 documents at this page from the National Security Archive.

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The Justice Department has gotten the message from journalists, interest groups and government watchdogs and has decided to withdraw its proposal to allow federal agencies to lie to people seeking sensitive documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

Currently, if a requested document is so sensitive that it would be dangerous to acknowledge its very existence, the government is allowed to tell you that it can neither confirm nor deny whether there is such a document.

Last month, the Justice Department proposed a rule revision that would let government agencies tell requesters there is no such document — even if there is. According to the proposal, which was retrieved by the nonprofit investigative project ProPublica, agencies would be allowed to "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist."

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(You can read ProPublica's original story here and — assuming you want to plow through all 9,000 words of it — the entire DOJ proposal here.)

The proposal drew together an odd assortment of Washington types in opposition, collecting Republicans like Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas with Democrats like Sens. Pat Leahy of Vermont and Mark Udall of Colorado under the umbrella of the American Civil Liberties Union, which uncovered the proposal.

Grassley sent a letter to the Justice Department last month demanding an explanation. (As the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he can feel fairly certain that his letters get read by top officials there.) He said in a statement this week that "the Justice Department decided that misleading the American people would be wrong, and made the right decision to pull the proposed regulation."

Laura Murphy, who runs the ACLU's D.C. operations, said putting an end to "lies about the mere existence of documents is one step toward restoring Americans' trust in their government."

NPR has a good explanation of the background to the dispute here.

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Alex Johnson covers breaking news, projects and technology for msnbc.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MAlexJohnson and on Facebook at MAlexJohnsonMSNBC.

The Center for Public Integrity and Politico have an interesting follow-up story on the lists of visitors to President Barack Obama's White House. Readers may remember that msnbc.com pursued the visitor logs persistently, reporting in a series of articles on gaps in the White House release of public records.

Here's the gist of Politico's story:

The White House website proudly boasts of making available “over 1,000,000 records of everyone who’s come through the doors of the White House” via a searchable database.

Yet the Center’s analysis shows that the logs routinely omit or cloud key details about the identity of visitors, whom they met with and the nature of their visits. The logs even include the names of people who never showed up. These are critical gaps that raise doubts about the records’ historical accuracy and utility in helping the public understand White House operations, from social events to meetings on key policy debates.

The reporters point out how few visitors are recorded with the former White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, with visitors apparently ascribed to underlings who set up meetings.

Read the rest of the story by Viveca Novak and Fred Schulte, on Politico's website.

As we've pointed out before, another weakness in the records is that they give no hometown, and often no affiliation. Knowing a name is not enough to know whether the name listed is the same as a person who represents a particular lobbying interest.

And the White House has not released most of the records from the first eight months of the administration. To find out whether someone visited during that period, a member of the public or journalist must guess at the names. The administration will confirm a visitor during that period, but won't release the list wholesale. The White House says the Secret Service data system was not set up for wholesale release during that period, with confidential and security information mixed in with visitor logs.

Still today, the Obama White House takes the same position as its predecessors, arguing that its release of visitor logs is voluntary. Msnbc.com and others have argued, and federal courts have ruled, that release is required under the Freedom of Information Act, because these are agency records under the control of the Secret Service. (Agency records are subject to the FOIA law, while White House records are not.)

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The Obama administration argues, correctly, that it is the first to release wholesale information on visitors. Still, it's also true that it did so under pressure from the press and advocacy groups, and that its release of information has been less than 100 percent.

Stories in our msnbc.com series on the White House visitor logs:

• Obama blocks list of visitors to White House
• After lawsuit, Obama opens a bit of info on meetings with health care executives.
• Obama yields on most White House visitor logs
• Help figure out who has been lobbying Obama
• Obama names 110 White House visitors
• Obama is sued for White House visitor list