Why Japan is so safe from guns

? Yuriko Nakao / Reuters/REUTERS

Tadakazu Shimoyama, chief mechanician at the Ennis gun shop, displays a rifle in Tokyo in 2007.

Everyone wants to live in a country that never has any mass shootings.

The Japanese do. So, what?s their secret?

It?s not hard to figure out: Japan stringently suppresses gun ownership. Even compared to the United Kingdom, whose gun controls are the most repressive of any major country in Western Europe, Japan is extreme. No rifles. No handguns. Shotguns and air guns are allowed only under a licensing system that is designed to discourage everyone but the most highly motivated from applying for a license.

To get a license in Japan, you have to pass a psychological exam and run the gauntlet of a paperwork process made to be inconvenient. Once you get a license, you better be able to account for every round of ammunition you ever shot at target practice or while hunting.

The last time Japan suffered a mass shooting comparable to last Friday?s murders in Newtown, Conn., was back in 1938, when a man dying of then-incurable tuberculosis murdered 30 people with a shotgun, an ax and a sword.

Japan has seen some mass homicides since then. In 1995, a terrorist organization attacked the Tokyo subway with sarin gas, murdering 13 people. In 2001, a school janitor murdered eight students with a kitchen knife. In 2008, a man murdered three people by hitting them with a truck, then stabbed four more to death.

Yet these incidents, awful as they are, illustrate the obvious truth that it is easier for most people to kill with a gun than with anything else. Guns are unique. They are the only tool that allows an ordinary person, without physical strength, to project lethal force at a distance.

This makes guns indispensable for the 78-year-old grandmother defending herself against home invaders, and it also makes guns peculiarly dangerous in the hands of a scrawny 20-year-old man intent on murder.

Most would-be mass killers are losers, without the technical skills needed to manufacture a bomb, let alone poison gas. Weaklings and cowards, they lack the strength and the dexterity to rapidly kill lots of people up close, with a knife.

Theoretically, a Japanese sociopath could purchase an illegal firearm on the black market. But the isolates inclined to mass murder lack the social skills to engage the organized crime networks that guard their illegal guns jealously.

So Japan has very few guns, no mass murders with guns in more than 70 years and very few mass murders of any sort.

Japan?s near-prohibition on firearms reflects the pervasive ethos that the individual is subordinate to the collective. Americans say ?the squeaky wheel gets the grease?; Japanese say ?the nail that sticks out will be pounded down.?

A powerful network of social control keeps all forms of Japanese crime, gun and nongun, very low. In Japan, you can put your 9-year-old on a two-hour train ride by herself to Disneyland Tokyo and not worry for a second about her safety.

Yet the Japanese culture of conformity and submission carries a heavy price. The Japanese suicide rate is double that in the U.S. When you combine homicide and suicide rates, Japanese are more likely to meet a premature violent death than are Americans. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese readily acceded to an aggressive and genocidal military dictatorship, partly because the government held a monopoly of force.

Source: http://feeds.nydailynews.com/~r/nydnrss/opinions/~3/5blKl3SCxg4/story01.htm

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