The biggest news of the day:
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinobu Abe was assassinated while giving a campaign speech.
Shinzo Abe: Japan ex-leader assassinated while giving speech
Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe has died in hospital after he was shot at a political campaign event.
Abe was shot at twice while he was giving a speech on a street in the city of Nara on Friday morning.
Security officials at the scene tackled the gunman and a 41-year-old suspect is now in police custody.
The suspect, named as Tetsuya Yamagami, admitted shooting Abe with a homemade gun, and said he had a grudge against a “specific organisation”, police said.
Several other handmade weapons, similar to those used in the attack, had been confiscated after a search of the suspect’s house, police officers told a news conference.
Explosives were also found at the home and police said they had advised residents to evacuate the area.
The assassin used a homemade double barrel pistol.
Guns are very difficult to obtain in Japan.
The amount of smoke from the time of the shooting leads me to believe the weapon used black powder from fireworks or some other legal recreational source.
I have two thoughts.
One: Abe was an ally of Trump and a Japanese nationalist.
I’m deeply suspicious that his assassination was supported by China, which does not want a Japan aligned with America.
Two: We will see this used in the US to ramp up attacks on homemade guns and “ghost guns.” They will not let this crisis go to waste.
That’s a “ghost gun” (like the old “zip guns”) that will be nearly impossible to prevent. I understand that Japanese firearms laws are draconian (when I was there in the late ’60s and in the Navy, we were told that if we liked Japan and wanted to spend the rest of our lives there, just get caught with a firearm). Genies just don’t go back into their bottles.
True. But from the gun control perspective that’s not relevant. What they would do with a ghost gun ban, is to eliminate the casual hobbyist (like, I presume, many of the readers of this blog might be) from rolling their own. I suspect – at this point in time – there are far more casual hobbyist types than dedicated assassination-planning nutjobs.
.
They’re not interested in preventing black-swan events, such as political killings or school shootings. They want wholesale disarmament. So they don’t go after the tails of the bell curve, they go after the near wings and then head towards the center.
Phil Luty’s famous website http://thehomegunsmith.com has “hardware store grade” designs a whole lot more competent than the contraption shown in those photos. Good grief, wrinkled duct tape as a structural element??? Luty wrote in England, where the laws are only slightly less crazy than in Japan.