Source: The Atlantic; Max Fisher; July 23, 2012
Article:
“
A Land Without
Guns
: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting
Deaths”
In part by forbidding almost all forms of firearm ownership, the country has as few as two gun-related homicides a year.
I’ve heard it said that, if you take a walk around Waikiki, it’s only a matter of time until someone hands you a flyer of scantily clad women clutching handguns, overlaid with English and maybe Japanese text advertising one of the many local shooting ranges. The city’s largest, the Royal Hawaiian Shooting Club, advertises instructors fluent in Japanese, which is also the default language of its website. For years, this peculiar Hawaiian industry has explicitly targeted Japanese tourists, drawing them away from beaches and resorts into shopping malls, to do things that are forbidden in their own country.
Waikiki’s Japanese-filled ranges are the sort of quirk you might find in any major tourist town, but they're also an intersection of two societies with wildly different approaches to guns and their role in society. Friday’s horrific shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater has been a reminder that
America's gun control laws are the loosest in the developed world and its rate of gun-related homicide is the highest. Of the world’s 23 “rich” countries, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is almost 20 times that of the other 22. With almost one privately owned firearm per person, America’s ownership rate is the highest in the world; tribal-conflict-torn Yemen is ranked second, with a rate about half of America's.
But what about the country at the other end of the spectrum? What is the role of guns in Japan, the developed world's least firearm-filled nation and perhaps its strictest controller? In 2008, the U.S. had over 12 thousand firearm-related homicides. All of Japan experienced only 11, fewer than were killed at the Aurora shooting alone. And that was a big year: 2006 saw an astounding two, and when that number jumped to 22 in 2007, it became a national scandal. By comparison, also in 2008, 587 Americans were killed just by guns that had discharged accidentally.
Almost no one in Japan owns a gun. Most kinds are illegal, with onerous restrictions on buying and maintaining the few that are allowed. Even the country's infamous, mafia-like Yakuza tend to forgo guns; the few exceptions tend to become big national news stories.
Japanese tourists who fire off a few rounds at the Royal Hawaiian Shooting Club would be breaking three separate laws back in Japan—one for holding a handgun, one for possessing unlicensed bullets, and another violation for firing them -- the first of which alone is punishable by one to ten years in jail.
Handguns are forbidden absolutely. Small-caliber rifles have been illegal to buy, sell, or transfer since 1971. Anyone who owned a rifle before then is allowed to keep it, but their heirs are required to turn it over to the police once the owner dies.
The only guns that Japanese citizens can legally buy and use are shotguns and air rifles, and it’s not easy to do. The process is detailed in David Kopel’s landmark study on Japanese gun control, published in the 1993 Asia Pacific Law Review, still cited as current. (Kopel, no left-wing loony, is a member of the National Rifle Association and once wrote in National Review that looser gun control laws could have stopped Adolf Hitler.)
hospital for a mental test and drug test (Japan is unusual in that potential gun owners must affirmatively prove their mental fitness), which you’ll file with the police. Finally, pass a rigorous background check for any criminal record or association with criminal or extremist groups, and you will be the proud new owner of your shotgun or air rifle. Just don’t forget to provide police with documentation on the specific location of the gun in your home, as well as the ammo, both of which must be locked and stored separately. And remember to have the police inspect the gun once per year and to re-take the class and exam every three years.
Even the most basic framework of Japan’s approach to gun ownership is almost the polar opposite of America’s. U.S. gun law begins with the second amendment's affirmation of the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” and narrows it down from there. Japanese law, however, starts with the 1958 act stating that “No person shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords,” later adding a few exceptions. In other words, American law is designed to enshrine access to guns, while Japan starts with the premise of forbidding it. The history of that is complicated, but it's worth noting that U.S. gun law has its roots in resistance to British gun restrictions, whereas some academic literature links the Japanese law to the national campaign to forcibly disarm the samurai, which may partially explain why the 1958
mentions firearms and swords side-by-side.
Of course, Japan and the U.S. are separated by a number of cultural and historical difference much wider than their gun policies. Kopel explains that, for whatever reason, Japanese tend to be more tolerant of the broad search and seizure police powers necessary to enforce the ban. “Japanese, both criminals and ordinary citizens, are much more willing than their American counterparts to consent to searches and to answer questions from the police,” he writes. But even the police did not carry firearms themselves until, in 1946, the American occupation authority ordered them to. Now, Japanese police receive more hours of training than their American counterparts, are forbidden from carrying off-duty, and invest hours in studying martial arts in part because they “are expected to use [firearms] in only the rarest of circumstances,” according to Kopel.
The Japanese and American ways of thinking about crime, privacy, and police powers are so different—and Japan is such a generally peaceful country—that it’s functionally impossible to fully isolate and compare the two gun control regiments. It's not much easier to balance the costs and benefits of Japan's unusual approach, which helps keep its murder rate at the second-lowest in the world, though at the cost of restrictions that Kopel calls a “police state,” a worrying suggestion that it hands the
Source: The Economist; June 19, 2015
Article:
“
Why
gun control
is doomed”
NO NEW laws restricting access to guns will be passed as a result of Wednesday’s racist shooting rampage, which left nine dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Americans can be confident this is true for several reasons. For starters, Barack Obama more or less admitted it.
Americans need to reckon with the fact that other advanced countries do not have to face this sort of mass violence, the president said in a sombre statement at the White House on Thursday. “It is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognising the politics in this town foreclose a lot of the avenues just now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it,” he said, with visible frustration.
The president knows that if it were politically possible to pass new gun laws in Washington, it would have happened after the December 2012 massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. It is hard to imagine a tragedy more calculated to shock American consciences: 20 small children and six staff were gunned down in their elementary school in a quaint New England community by a disturbed young man, wielding a rifle from his mother’s gun collection. Various marginal tweaks to gun laws were tried and failed to gain traction in Congress. Finally, a bipartisan push was made to merely enforce existing laws better. This would have expanded the number of gun-buyers checked for histories of crime or severe mental illness. It failed, too.
Americans can be confident that South Carolina is not about to pass new gun laws, either. During a standing ovation that followed a call for gun controls at a vigil on Thursday, two Republican leaders
remained seated, hands in their laps: Governor Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott. For them it was easier to suffer a moment’s embarrassment than face accusations from local Republicans that they are “gun grabbers”, unwilling to defend what conservatives believe is a near-absolute right to bear arms in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
For further evidence, contemplate the lock-step reaction to the massacre on conservative talk-radio, cable TV and the internet. Because questions are being asked about why it was so easy for Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old suspected shooter, to get a handgun when he had alarmed his own friends with angry talk of starting a race war and was arrested for drug possession in February 2015, gun fans turned the tables. As so often before, they asserted that the problem was not the absence of laws controlling access to guns, but the opposite. They hastened to explain that South Carolina’s existing (and strikingly weak) gun controls and background checks had kept guns out of the hands of honest folk, such as pastors, who should have been armed to protect themselves.
Charles Cotton, a board member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), went so far as to
Others, such as Dana Loesch, a popular conservative talk radio host and gun advocate, argued that Mr Roof’s access to a gun, despite his drug arrest, simply illustrates the ineffectiveness of any law designed to control access to guns. “In order for laws to work, criminals must follow them,” she scoffed.
This is a remarkably cynical argument. The NRA and its allies have in fact worked tirelessly to limit the use of background checks in South Carolina and elsewhere. South Carolina is already what is known as a “shall issue” state, meaning that law-enforcement agencies must issue a concealed-carry gun permit to an applicant who passes a background check (states that are “may issue” give officials some discretion when granting such licences). Seeking to widen access further, this April the state House of
Representatives voted for so-called “permitless carry”, under which citizens not legally barred from owning a gun are allowed to carry one without applying for a license. Permits are still needed for now, after the state senate decided to wait until next year to consider this bill.
Gun fans have also said, as they always do, that the root cause of gun massacres is mental illness, not guns. As it happens in 2013 Mr Pinckney introduced a bill in the state Senate that would have obliged firearms dealers to conduct background checks and interviews to establish the mental state of someone trying to buy an assault rifle. It went nowhere.
Finally, though Charleston’s long-time Democratic mayor, Joseph Riley, has supported gun control for many years, and said after the shooting that it is “far too easy” to gain access to a deadly weapon, Americans may be confident that no municipal ordinances will be passed in his state.
That is because South Carolina’s state legislature, knowing that some jurisdictions may be less conservative than others, stuck a “pre-emption clause” in the state code in 2011, barring the “governing body of any county, municipality, or other political subdivision in the State” from trying to regulate firearms.
But to best understand why gun laws in this country are not about to change, one must also recognise the disproportionate power of the gun lobby. The NRA rallies supporters with a masterful use of fear and distrust of government, and intimidates Republican politicians by turning support for gun rights into a defining test of conservative values. The group consistently and successfully diverts attention away from guns to mental illness.
There is also a painful dilemma that honest advocates of gun control must address. It is not clear that limited gun control, of the sort that might be politically possible in America, would actually make gun massacres much rarer, or even stop the country from topping rich-world lists for gun deaths by a mile. For once guns are reasonably common in a society, it is easy to see why some people will feel safer arming themselves. The sort of gun control that has had dramatic results in other countries, such as Britain or Japan, essentially involves no guns, or making it essentially impossible for private citizens to own handguns. This is not about to happen in America.
Here is one last reason why gun laws are so hard to change: America is becoming an increasingly polarised society.
Gallup pollsters have asked Americans the same question for some years, namely whether having a gun in the house makes it a safer or more dangerous place to be. In 2000 Republicans were already more likely than Democrats to think that guns made a home safer, by a margin of 44% to 28%. Just before Mr Obama’s election in 2008 Democrats had become more gun-friendly, with 41% thinking them a source of safety, compared to 53% of Republicans. Then the gap between the two parties exploded. By 2014 Democrats were still at 41%, but 81% of Republicans now said that a gun made their homes safer.
Pew Research Centre polling shows that whites are almost twice as likely as blacks and Hispanics to say it is more important to protect gun rights than to control access to guns. Those living in rural areas and Americans living in the South and Midwest are far keener on guns than those in the north-east.
Post-graduates are much keener on gun control than those with high school educations alone. Gun ownership follows similar trends.
In short, questions over guns are becoming questions of identity. When Mr Obama or the mayor of Charleston says that gun control would be a logical response to Wednesday’s killings, the message
