Land of the Rising Sun and the Forbidden Gun
Just got back from Japan, the archetypical country of low crime and no weapons.
Japan has the anti-2nd Amendment, a law that starts “No-one shall possess a fire-arm or fire-arms or a sword or swords”. The ban excludes only shotguns kept for sporting purposes. Shotguns require a whole bunch of hoops, including a mental screening.They must be kept locked separately from ammo, which must also be locked. Shotgun licenses are easily and arbitrarily lost. Handguns and rifles are completely banned.
On top of that, the police there are super nosy. Citizens have relatively few of the freedoms and protections from government intrusions we Americans enjoy. Search and seizure protections, for example, are scant and routinely ignored without penalty.
I normally carry a knife or two for utility purposes. I left them all at home because I couldn’t find any good information on what blades are legal in the various cities I visited in Japan. I walked around for a couple weeks, a disarmed man in a disarmed society.
The complete lack of crime there made it thoroughly enjoyable. I carried large amounts of cash late at night in industrial neighborhoods. I had no worries about my gf being of on her own in a strange country where she doesn’t speak the language. I never felt threatened. It’s easy to see how trading one’s rights and freedoms for that kind of daily comfort can be seductive.
In America, we are taught to love our freedom and individuality. It is a core value that is sometimes at odds with day-to-day safety and stability. Politicians are paid to keep things safe and stable, which is why they are forever trying to take our freedom and fight individual expression. It’s good to be home.
September 17th, 2006 at 12:37 am
Sounds like they could give Sarah Brady a good home.
September 17th, 2006 at 9:40 am
Even in the case of Japan, I don’t credit their near-police-state system with their low crime rate. (Of course, even if I did, I still wouldn’t want that system here.) Another interesting thing about Japan’s low crime rates is than Japanese-Americans have even lower crime rates than Japanese.
September 17th, 2006 at 9:46 am
I’ve had several Japanese clients in the past. Whenever they come to the US, they do two things:
Go to a strip club
Go shooting
Apparently, they don’t get those at home. Oh, a third thing is they buy a big American car.
September 17th, 2006 at 11:15 am
Some years ago, Japan experienced a spike in gun crime. While their “spike” would still be way low for many big cities in the US, it was still a big deal in Japan and the public and the media were clamoring for action.
Now in the US, politicians would respond by proposing more gun control, but what could politicians do in Japan, which already had some of the harshest gun control in the world?
Answer below…
They proposed more gun control.
What? Did you think that just because someplace already had some of the harshest gun control in the world, politicians would not propose MORE?
September 17th, 2006 at 11:18 am
Youo forget that the first thing they do is go golfing. Then they go do that other stuff.
I wonder if they had that spike in gun control when they also had a spike in Brazillian immigrants? The funny thing is that the brazillian immigrants were actually Japanese coming back. They had adopted a more Brazillian culture which the native Japanese couldn’t stand.
September 17th, 2006 at 11:23 am
As Egregious mentioned, alot of Japan’s crime rate is due to cultural factors. In fact, if you look at different racial and ethnic groups in the US, you find that in most cases crime rates are not too different than in the countries they came from.
For example, Utah’s homicide rate is already well below the national average (about 2.0 per 100,000). Considering however, that about half of Utah homicides victims are Hispanic — more specifically, recent Mexican immigrants — Utahns of European descent have homicide rates equal to, or lower than, their British and Scandinavian cousins.
Of course, it’s highly politically incorrect to point this out, but the truth is often controversial.
September 18th, 2006 at 12:27 am
If you ignore the inner cities, the US has a crime rate that compares favorably to most european countries. It’s a huge problem we have been sweeping under the rug since the mid 60s with healthy doses of welfare and gun control.
Thomas Sowell has an awesome book called “Black Redneck White Liberal” in which he exposes urban black culture as actually being an old form of southern white culture. This harmful culture that idolizes ignorance and laziness has essentially been eradicated amongst everyone but urban blacks. The difference is that when whites failed for cultural reasons, they had no excuses to fall back upon. They either shaped up or got voted off the island. Instead, the blacks got people like Jesse Jackson telling them that the welfare state owed them a living and that if they failed it was due to white oppression.
September 18th, 2006 at 9:23 am
“It’s easy to see how trading one’s rights and freedoms for that kind of daily comfort can be seductive.”
Who on earth would believe that “trading one’s rights and freedoms” would actually lead to “daily comfort”? Unless “that kind of daily comfort” means the kind of comfort you have knowing the police can come in and do what they want, when they want. I don’t think I’d trade my freedoms for that.
September 18th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
You could give every person in japan an M16 with a grenade launcher and the crime rate wouldnt go up a bit. The japanese are culturally inclined to behave and also culturally disinclined to demand that their individuality be respected by anyone. The japanese are going to be japanese regardless of what form of government you impose upon them.
It reminds me of a discussion I had with my torts profession last week about how different countries do liability differently and it basically boiled down to different cultures causing people to behave differently, which shaped the legal system and how it was used.
September 18th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Friend of mine builds AR-15 clones in 6mmX45 and sells the heck out of them to a dealer in Japan…