New York, America's world city, had 3,286 major felonies last year just in its subway system. In the United States easy availability of guns encourages crime and makes murder an almost expected accompaniment of mugging or rape.

No American, taking armed robbers for granted, would have resisted handing over his watch as did the businessman Sunday. In America innocent children and adults get killed or wounded by stray bullets in every major city almost routinely.

In Hong Kong, where population size, density and poverty exceed nearly all American cities, when was anyone shot in crossfire?

I recall only once in the past 18 years when that happened here.

For astonished US readers, let me repeat that. When was someone killed in accidental crossfire from guns in Hong Kong, a city of seven million people? Once in a generation.

I see women jogging alone late at night in a country park or routinely walking by themselves in the early hours through a deserted parking lot. No woman, and few men, in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles would dare such a thing. At least, not unless they had a pistol strapped on.

The consequences of America's so-called freedom to festoon everyone with firearms are obvious. Anyone unwilling to go about armed and dangerous barricades themselves indoors and keeps their head low in this ``land of the free and home of the brave.'' Here in Hong Kong, where only police are permitted to carry guns, nearly everyone, male and female, young and old, child and adult, wanders around freely at all hours. That's real freedom. I have cited this before as evidence that at least certain aspects of freedom are greater in a Hong Kong run by the Chinese Communist Party than in an America run by the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party and George Bush.

Now, astonishingly, growing evidence indicates even freedom of the press is also healthier in Tung Chee-hwa's ``communist''-run Hong Kong than in Bush's United States.

For the sixth time the Bush White House has been caught either buying the services of, or outright faking, journalism.

In the latest scandal, a ``Jeff Gannon'' whose real name turned out to be Jim Guckert, interviewed Bush and other high government officials while posing as a credentialed journalist. Apparently, the White House was complicit with this ploy just as it had been in other cases where it paid journalists to write favorable stories.

This White House has a routine habit of limiting ``news'' of the president to so-called town meetings where every member of the audience is hand-picked and every question cleared beforehand by aides.

The Government Accountability Office designated some such so-called news packages put out by the White House as ``covert propaganda'' and hence an illegal expenditure of public funds.

The Bush Pentagon even runs its own propaganda ``news'' service, the Pentagon Channel, now broadcast via satellite television on the Dish network. With Fox that makes two propaganda channels.

Bush's Justice Department is even attempting to jail real journalists protecting confidential sources who leaked details of how the administration revealed a CIA agent's name.

Revealing agents' names is illegal, but Robert Novak, a right-wing journalist who first did, has yet to even be charged. Meanwhile, highly respected, sometime critical journalist Judith Miller of The New York Times faces 18 months' imprisonment for merely researching a story, which she never published, about who revealed the covert agent's name.

Regular readers know I am no fan of the Tung administration.

But at least his Information Services Department arranges for visiting journalists and other dignitaries to occasionally get an alternative view, even from yours truly.

RTHK, government-run radio and television, airs all views.

In contrast, in yet another incident indicating its disdain for press freedoms, in 2000 the Bush regime stripped Maureen Dowd, another New York Times journalist and frequent Bush critic who had a White House press pass from 1986, of her credentials. Entering Bush's fifth year in the White House, she has yet to get her credentials back. When next the United States brings up China's human rights record, China should retort that in the one world city on its soil, Hong Kong, freedom shines brighter than in New York.

Perhaps we should offer the Statue of Liberty a new spot at Green Island, just outside the harbor. That bearer of freedom's torch would feel both safer and freer here.

degolyer@hkbu.edu.hk

Michael DeGolyer is an associate professor of the government and international studies department at Hong Kong Baptist University