New Gun Laws Japan

Here`s what you need to know about gun and safety laws in Japan: “Since guns arrived, Japan has always had strict gun laws,” Iain Overton, executive director of Action on Armed Violence, a British advocacy group, told the BBC. They are the first nation to introduce gun laws in the world, and I think that has created a foundation that says guns really don`t matter in civil society. Japan has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. Shootings like the one that killed former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are exceptionally rare. The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Japan may seem like a rebuke to the country`s notoriously strict gun laws. Experts who study gun laws point out that even the strictest measures cannot completely eradicate human violence. On the contrary, restrictions, if successful, can both reduce the severity of this violence and impose obstacles that make it less common. China, which also has strict gun laws, has seen a series of seemingly random stabbings against schoolchildren. The attacks, which have continued, claim a dozen lives each year. Wasn`t this proof, some Americans asked, that gun restrictions, after failing to stop attacks in China, were ineffective against such violence? According to Japanese gun laws, the only weapons allowed for sale are shotguns and air rifles – handguns are banned. But getting them is a long and complicated process that requires effort and a lot of patience.

Japanese laws make obtaining a gun license and legally purchasing a firearm a laborious process. Few people in the country own a gun, according to the Small Arms Survey database. To underscore this link, the few countries that have significantly tightened formerly liberal gun laws, such as Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway, have seen their rates of gun violence and mass shootings drop dramatically. Japan has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. But PolitiFact experts said the circumstances that led to Abe`s fatal shootings showed the efforts the author had to make to circumvent those rules, and should not be seen as an example of why gun laws don`t work. Police said the suspect who shot Abe built his own gun from everyday materials. Suzuki said this is how he circumvented Japan`s strict gun laws. Japan was the first country in the world to introduce gun laws, according to Overton. The assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shocked Japan, a country with one of the lowest gun crime rates in the world due to its strict gun ownership laws. But despite all the cultural and political specificities of these two companies, both fit neatly into a consistent global trend that has been repeatedly established in independent research. Countries with stricter gun laws have fewer firearms in circulation, legal or illegal.

And the fewer guns a country has, the fewer gun murders, mass shootings, or political assassinations it suffers. GunPolicy.org, an international tool for tracking the law on guns and violence from the University of Sydney, counted 32 firearm deaths, including suicides and accidents, in Japan from 2017 to 2018. GunPolicy.org draws its data from the World Health Organization`s mortality database, which indicates that its data can often differ from law enforcement reports due to different definitions and reporting methods. Activists argue that tightening gun laws not only saves lives, but also allows a society as a whole to live in greater comfort and security, even if the risk of violence can never be completely eliminated. The New York Times, “Are Japan`s gun laws a success or a failure after Abe shooting?”, July 9, 2022 The senior law enforcement officer in Nara, Japan, where the shooting took place, acknowledged flaws in Abe`s security protocol and said those issues were being investigated. The Washington Post reported. It is unclear how many members of the security forces were present at the campaign rally where Abe was shot. “It was apparently handmade and was 40cm long and 20cm high,” a Nara police spokesman said at a press conference about the weapon. With a population of 125 million, the country recorded only 10 firearms-related criminal cases last year, resulting in a single death and four injuries, according to police.

Eight of these cases were gang-related. All these shooters had acquired their weapons legally. These are just a few of the more than 300 mass shootings in the U.S. this year alone, according to one count.