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LONG BEACH, N.Y. — It is February, but the smell of Christmas wafts up from the shores of Long Beach these days.

The Cat wore a hat. Everyone knows that.

WASHINGTON — The Israeli attack last week on a Syrian convoy of antiaircraft weapons appears to have also hit the country's main research center for work on biological and chemical weapons, according to American officials who are sorting through intelligence reports.

Although the debate over stemming gun violence after the massacre in Newtown, Conn., is breaking down mostly along partisan lines in the nation's statehouses — with several Democratic governors calling for stricter gun laws as most Republicans urge tighter security or revamped mental health policies — the handful of exceptions show the political and geographical complexities of the issue.

More than a dozen governors invoked the Newtown school shooting as they opened their legislative sessions in recent weeks with State of the State addresses, and most have weighed in on the shooting in other forums. Several Democratic governors, mainly along the East Coast, are calling for banning some semiautomatic weapons or large capacity magazines, while several Republican governors have urged other measures, noting their opposition to more restrictive gun laws. But the state-level debate has not always followed party lines.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican who is mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, recently noted that he had long supported his state's existing laws, which he described as "some of the toughest gun control measures in place in the country."

Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota, a Democrat, was quoted after the shooting as saying that his "reading of the Constitution is that it provides a complete permission for any law-abiding citizen to possess firearms, whichever ones he or she chooses, and the ammunition to go with that." And another Democrat, Gov. Mike Beebe of Arkansas, is likely to sign a bill working its way through the state's Republican legislature, which he was neutral on, that would allow people to bring concealed handguns to churches that choose to allow them.

But in many states, the contours of the debate are following familiar party lines. Democratic governors in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Massachusetts are among those calling for stricter gun laws, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has already won the passage of the sweeping gun measures he sought after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. Many Republican governors, meanwhile, are making it clear that they oppose new restrictions on guns.

In many states, governors are raising the issue in their addresses to lawmakers.

"Who can watch the sad images of the last several weeks, who can see the pictures of those young faces, and honestly say that we are doing enough?" Gov. Martin O'Malley of Marylan, a Democrat, asked in his State of the State address last week. Mr. O'Malley urged state lawmakers to ban the sale of "military-style assault weapons," require licenses for buying handguns, bolster mental health treatment and information sharing and spend more on school security.

Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, a Republican who took office this year, said in his speech that he would seek additional money in the state budget for "a comprehensive school safety review," but made it clear that he would oppose limiting access to guns.

"All of us were heartbroken after every parent's worst nightmare unfolded in Newtown, Conn.," said Mr. Pence, a former member of Congress. "While others have rushed to the well-worn arguments over gun control, Hoosiers know this is not about access to firearms. It is about access to schools. Hoosiers have responsibilities to protect our kids and Hoosiers have rights. We will protect our kids, and we will protect our rights."

As Washington debates President Obama's call for stricter federal gun laws, the state-level debate is unfolding at an unusually partisan moment in statehouses, with more states controlled by just one party than at any time in the past six decades. Republicans have the upper hand, holding the governor's office and legislative majorities in 24 states, while the Democrats control both the executive and legislative branches in just 13 states. The stark divide can be seen in many of the bills being weighed in states this year.

In Tennessee, which is controlled by Republicans, lawmakers have introduced bills this year that would allow school employees to carry guns, let people keep guns and ammunition locked in their cars at public and private parking lots, and withhold state funds from being used to enforce any new federal law or executive order that "imposes restrictions on citizens who lawfully possess or carry firearms in this state."

In heavily Democratic Massachusetts, meanwhile, Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, is calling for legislation to ban magazines containing more than seven rounds of ammunition, require background checks for private gun sales, and limit people to buying one gun a month. In his address to lawmakers, he said that the proposals would "help stop tragedies like Newtown or the recent shooting of a 13-year-old boy in Roxbury on his way to choir practice."

Most Republicans said that they had drawn other lessons from the Newtown shooting. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican who said in her speech that "the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was unimaginable," rejected calls for stricter gun laws in her address to the Legislature.

"Arizonans have reduced crime by punishing criminals, and not by infringing on the rights of law-abiding gun owners," she said.

Ms. Brewer focused instead on school safety, saying that her budget would call for more money for school resource officers to provide security. "Our job now is to take common-sense steps that lessen the likelihood of a similar tragedy striking Arizona — while resisting the urge to turn a school into a fortress," she said.

Gov. C. L. Otter of Idaho (known as Butch) alluded to the Newtown shooting in his address to lawmakers as he called for spending money to build a new 579-bed secure mental health facility at a prison complex south of Boise.

"We all saw just a few weeks ago the terrible impact on a community and a nation when mental illness leads to tragedy," Mr. Otter said, echoing a commonly held belief, although the authorities have not described the mental state of Adam Lanza, the killer in Newtown, or said if he suffered from mental illness. Mr. Otter also ordered a review of school safety.

Some Democratic governors have said that they are holding out hope for a federal law that would apply to the whole nation. Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, who was endorsed last year by the National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund, has opposed taking action on gun laws at the state level but has said that he supports Mr. Obama's recommendations.

And Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, a Democrat who has said he would pursue gun control, school safety and mental health measures in response to the shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in his state, said that those issues must be addressed at the national level as well. "As long as weapons continue to travel up and down I-95," he said in his speech to lawmakers, "what is available for sale in Florida or Virginia can have devastating consequences here in Connecticut."

In the past few years, scientists have learned a lot about fear from a woman who could not experience it. A rare illness had damaged a part of her brain known as the amygdala and left her eerily unafraid.

Both in experiments and in life, the woman, known as SM, showed no fear of scary movies, snakes, spiders, or very real domestic assaults, death threats and robberies at knife and gunpoint.

Although she lived in an area "replete with crime, drugs, and danger," according to an earlier study, without a functioning amygdala, an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain long known to process fear, nothing scared her.

But recently SM had a panic attack. And the simple fact that she was able to know fear without a working amygdala, experts say, illuminates some of the brain's most fundamental processes and may have practical value in the study of panic attacks.

SM's moments of fear occurred during an experiment that involved inhaling carbon dioxide through a mask in amounts that are not harmful but create a momentary feeling of suffocation. Not only SM, but two other women, identified as AM and BG, identical twins with amygdala damage similar to SM's, showed all the physical symptoms of panic, and reported that, to their surprise, they felt intense fear.

The researchers, who report on the experiment in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience, had hypothesized that SM would not panic. John A. Wemmie, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa and the senior author of the paper, said, "We saw the exact opposite."

Antonio Damasio, of the University of Southern California, who had worked with SM and some of the researchers involved in this study on previous papers, but did not participate in this research, said he was delighted with the results, because it confirmed his own thinking that while the amygdala was central to fear generated by external threats, there was a different brain path that produced the feeling of fear generated by internal bodily experiences like a heart attack. This idea was put forth in a 2011 paper about SM on which he was a co-author.

"I think it's a very interesting and important result," he said

Dr. Joseph E. LeDoux, of New York University, who has extensively studied the amygdala but was not involved in the research, said in an e-mail, "This is a novel and important paper" in an area where there is much left to learn. He said scientists still did not understand "how the brain creates a conscious experience of fear" whether the amygdala or other systems are involved.

SM scores in the normal range on IQ and other tests, and voluntarily participated in this and earlier studies, all of which showed her lacking in any sort of fear response until now. In one, for example, she walked through a Halloween haunted house and never gasped, recoiled or screamed, as others did, when a person in a costume leaped out of the dark. She also did not seem to learn fear from life experiences.

So what was so unusual about carbon dioxide?

The answer seems to lie in the way the brain monitors disturbances in the world outside the body -- snakes and robbers -- compared with the way it monitors trouble inside the body -- hunger, heart attacks, the feeling of not being able to breathe. External threats clearly are processed by the amygdala. But she had never been tested for internal signals of trouble.

In the experiment SM and others participated in, they took one deep breath with plenty of oxygen but much more carbon dioxide than air usually contains. Humans are actually not sensitive to how much oxygen they are breathing, but to how much carbon dioxide is accumulating in the body, since it builds up quickly when one can't breathe. The sensation is familiar to anyone who has tried to hold their breath.

The researchers suggest that excess carbon dioxide produces signals that may be picked up in the brainstem and elsewhere, activating a fear-generating system in the brain that a venomous snake or a mugger with a gun would not trigger.

One puzzling aspect of the results is that SM and the two other women all reacted so strongly. Among people with normal brains, only those with panic disorder are reliably terrified in carbon dioxide experiments. Most people are not so susceptible, suggesting, said Colin Buzza, a co-author of the study and a medical student at the University of Iowa's Carver College of Medicine, that perhaps the amygdala is not functioning properly in eople with panic disorder.