A recent news report from NHK (link in Japanese, read with Chrome’s translate tool) shows us one of the myriad ways in which gun control laws can and have been made to look foolish.
In this case, a 29-year-old man was arrested for possessing a “coil gun,” a gun that uses an electromagnet to accelerate a chunk of metal up to speed. These guns have never been terribly effective, with even the best experimental guns accelerating the projectile up to not much better than BB gun speeds. Until just recently, Japanese law didn’t even prohibit them. The country’s gun control laws only prohibited firearms and other projectile-launching weapons, but not those using magnetic force.
After the law changed, Japanese police started looking around online (the article calls it the police’s “cyber patrol”) for Japanese people who had posted photos or videos of coil guns. Then, they’d investigate and see if they could catch someone with one. When police questioned the man in this case, he told them that he had made the coil gun back in high school, and had kept it ever since.
The NHK article says that police are currently working on a campaign to get people to voluntarily give their coil guns to the police who will pick them up or accept them if they’re turned in at police stations, so there must be a significant number of them in the country. For every coil gun police have found, there are likely thousands if not tens of thousands more of them in drawers and closets in contravention of the current prohibition.
All of which only serves to demonstrate how Japan’s gun control laws laws are readily bypassed. The best example in recent memory was the man who assassinated former PM Shinzo Abe using a home-built gun. Using nothing but pipes, homemade explosives, some shrapnel, and an electronic ignition system, a weapon every bit as deadly as one bought in a gun shop was built.
Without a daily inspection of every household and business in Japan, along with the corresponding end to all privacy rights for the nation’s citizens, there’s no way to truly enforce gun control. The same obviously applies to other countries including the United States. With technologies, like metalworking, 3D printing, electrochemical machining, normal machining, and basically every other way of fabricating or making virtually anything, there are a thousand ways to build a gun, some very durable, effective, and accurate.
Ultimately, Japan, like every country on the planet, is going to have to make a choice. They can continue to ignore the reality of ineluctable technological advancement and attempt to keep the genie crammed inside the bottle. That would require self-delusion all the way to its conclusion, where all liberty is traded for a promise of security that never actually arrives. Or, they can realize that the Japanese society’s low violence isn’t due to its gun control laws, but to its social stability. If they play to their strengths instead of their fears, the country could have a lot more security against rising threats across the East China Sea.
I wonder what would happen if the Japanese were to reverse the stringent gun ban and allow citizens the equivalent of our 2nd Amendment. Interesting thought experiment on how a highly educated, homogeneous society could transition to gun ownership from a strict, outright ban.
If that happened by some miracle, I would bet every dollar I own that the murder rate would not move a single percentage point.
Japan has averaged less than 20 criminal firearm discharge incidents per year in the last decade. No, that’s not deaths or even injuries, it’s JUST DISCHARGES. Meanwhile, the US will soon hit an average of 40,000 firearm-caused DEATHS per year. Of course it’s not all due to gun control, Japanese culture does not obsess over private gun ownership for example… And what does Japanese security against China have to do with private gun ownership and gun control? That’s such an insane and lame argument at the same time.
There are some factual errors and erronous speculation in this text btw:
1) “Until just recently, Japanese law didn’t even prohibit them. The country’s gun control laws only prohibited firearms and other projectile-launching weapons, but not those using magnetic force” – While Japanese law doesn’t prohibit magnetic guns specifically, any type of firearm that has lethal potential has been illegal and continiuous to be illegal regardless of the new law. That is why this man was arrested – his coilgun was deemed to have lethal potential. (This still has the potential to be reversed after further investigation.)
2) “After the law changed, Japanese police started looking around online” – the new law comes into effect in March next year, so it hasn’t changed yet. Again, the man was arrested because his weapon was illegal in accordance with the already existing laws on arms with lethal capacity. When the law changes, coilguns will be illegal regardless of lethal capacity.
3) “The NHK article says that police are currently working on a campaign to get people to voluntarily give their coil guns to the police […], so there must be a significant number of them in the country.” – why must there be a significant number? It’s very common in civilised countries to enact an amnesty programme when a law like this is changed. It doesn’t say anything about the amount of coilguns around in Japan, just that Japanese lawmakers want citizens not to be entrapped by a changing law, and that Japanese police has the resources to alleviate that.
4) “[…] there are a thousand ways to build a gun, some very durable, effective, and accurate.” – absolutely. And Japan is at the forefront of many of the technologies available, and has been since the 1980s. Japan also has very strict gun laws, and an extremely low amount of gun violence. I wonder what the connection could be…
“… Meanwhile, the US will soon hit an average of 40,000 firearm-caused DEATHS per year.”
Calling BS.
The 40k deaths per year in the US is (likely) a CDC figure. Most statisticians figure that 50% of those were also suicides. So, the CDC also listed “…of the 26,030 people killed in 2021, 103 died in active shooter events…”. What does that say about total number of peeps killed firearms?!
Certainly no where close to 40k. And how many firearm deaths are due to gang & criminal activities ? That is a stat that there is zero chance of ever tracking accurately. The best they can do is … “ According to a 2019 report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 60% of firearm deaths in the United States are gang-related.”
And in a study by Northwestern University, “ Gun violence is tragic, but, in the majority of cases, is decidedly not random.” … “The violence largely involved only a small fraction of the city’s gang “factions,” just 6%.” So a very small organized minority is responsible for the majority of firearms deaths in the People’s Republic of Chicago.
“ There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
This quote has been attributed to prominent humorist Mark Twain, and British statesman Benjamin Disraeli.