Do you think the Liberal news media will overexpose the latest school shooting to push stricter gun laws and a American police state??

First of all, with the exception of MSNBC there is no "liberal news media" in America. The alphabet networks have of late become almost as bad as Fox in their refusal to challenge outright lies by Right Wing talking heads and their repeated efforts to play the "both sides do it game" every time the conservatives screw something else up.

Second of all, your question is flawed, since stricter gun control and a so-called "police state" have nothing to do with each other. No one is suggesting that the Second Amendment should be repealed and no one is plotting to "take everyone's guns away". What the American people (including a majority of NRA members) want is common sense laws to prevent the likelihood of another tragedy like we saw in Sandy Hook Elementary. NO ONE needs an assault weapon for personal defense, and NO ONE needs a hundred or a thousand guns to keep their homes safe. The Second Amendment provides for a "well regulated militia", and all the American people want is to see the gun culture in our country "well regulated" as it was always intended to be. No one's rights are infringed by requiring background checks on ALL gun sales, including the "gun show loophole". No one is deprived of their rights by having to wait a few days before they get their new gun.

Third of all, it is MORE guns in our communities that deprive us of our freedom, not less. I want to be free to send a six year old to school without worrying about whether she will come home or be shot. I want to be able to buy a package of Skittles and walk home without being chased down by some idiotic vigilante who doesn't like my looks. Those freedoms disappear with each additional gun that enters my community.

One thing that's worse than living in a police state is living in a war zone. I don't want to live in either, but the latter is the only one we are in danger of falling into if the conservatives once again manage to shout down sensible regulations to protect the 300 million people who live here.

Gun Control Doesn't Reduce Murder

This study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence." Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more sophisticated and generally anti-gun counterparts across the pond, the answer is "no." And not just no, as in there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, but an emphatic no, showing a negative correlation: as gun ownership increases, murder and suicide decreases.

The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns. As the study's authors write in the report:

If the mantra "more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death" were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)

Finally, and as if to prove the bumper sticker correct - that "gun don't kill people, people do" - the study also shows that Russia's murder rate is four times higher than the U.S. and more than 20 times higher than Norway. This, in a country that practically eradicated private gun ownership over the course of decades of totalitarian rule and police state methods of suppression. Needless to say, very few Russian murders involve guns.

The important thing to keep in mind is not the rate of deaths by gun - a statistic that anti-gun advocates are quick to recite - but the overall murder rate, regardless of means. The criminologists explain:

[P]er capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent. (p. 663 - emphases in original)

It is important to note here that Profs. Kates and Mauser are not pro-gun zealots. In fact, they go out of their way to stress that their study neither proves that gun control causes higher murder rates nor that increased gun ownership necessarily leads to lower murder rates. (Though, in my view, Prof. John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime does indeed prove the latter.) But what is clear, and what they do say, is that gun control is ineffectual at preventing murder, and apparently counterproductive.