Former Japan Prime Minister SHOT Is Unresponsive

How can so many people be so clueless?

Here, I'll spell it out for you. "bryen e." was trying to make the point that gun control laws don't work/are useless, etc. With his post, he thought he was being oh-so-clever iin pointing out that the PM was killed in spite of the fact that there are few guns held by the public in Japan.

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Oh my, "bryan e.", you are oh-so-clever!

Thank you. Did you read my one about the musket? That one had a pretty good ratio compared to my normal posts. Check it out.

Political assassination has a long history, even in Japan:

"Nov 4, 1921: Prime Minister Takashi Hara, known as Japan's first "commoner" leader as he did not hail from the samurai class, died at the age of 65 after he was stabbed at Tokyo Station by a disillusioned railroad worker.
Nov 14, 1930: Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi, 61, was shot inside Tokyo Station by an ultra-nationalist who was enraged by the government's conciliatory foreign policies. He died of his wounds nine months later.
May 15, 1932: In what is now known as the "May 15 Incident" in Japan, 11 young Navy officers stormed the Prime Minister's Office and fatally shot Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, 76, in an attempt to launch a coup d'etat.
July 14, 1960: Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi - Mr Abe's maternal grandfather - was stabbed six times in his left thigh and left profusely bleeding after he was attacked by a right-wing activist outside the Prime Minister's Office. The then- 64-year-old survived the attack. He died at the age of 90 in 1987.
Oct 12, 1960: Japan Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma, 61, died after he was stabbed with a sword by a 17-year-old ultra-nationalist while he was speaking at a televised political debate in Hibiya in Tokyo.
June 16, 1975: Prime Minister Takeo Miki, who led from 1974 to 1976, was assaulted by a right-winger at the funeral of former Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. Mr Miki, then 68, was knocked to the ground after he was punched in the face twice.
Oct 21, 1990: Former Labour Minister Hyosuke Niwa, 79, died of his injuries 12 days after he was stabbed by a mental patient during a visit to a Ground Self-Defence Force garrison in Nagoya.
March 21, 1992: Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) vice-president Shin Kanemaru, who was deputy prime minister from 1986 to 1987, was shot at while he was delivering a speech in Tochigi prefecture. The bullets hit the lectern but did not injure Mr Kanemaru, who died of a stroke four years later at the age of 81.
May 30, 1994: Mr Morihiro Hosokawa was shot at just a month after stepped down as Prime Minister. A right-wing extremist, incensed by his apologies over Japan's actions during the war, fired a shot metres away from Mr Hosokawa at the lobby of a Shinjuku hotel. The bullet hit the ceiling and Mr Hosokawa, now 84, was uninjured.
October 25, 2002: Lower House lawmaker Koki Ishii, a 61-year-old opposition backbencher, was stabbed to death in front of his home in Tokyo by a right-wing extremist.
April 17, 2007: Nagasaki City Mayor Iccho Itoh, 61, died hours after he was shot twice in the back at point blank by a yakuza gang member as he campaigned for a fourth term as mayor."

straitstimes.com

Fatal shooting of Shinzo Abe: History of political assassinations and attempts in Japan

Hermes Auto

Mr Shinzo Abe is the first prime minister - sitting or former - to be assassinated in post-war Japan. Read more at straitstimes.com.

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In 2018, 39,000 people were killed by guns in the US. In Japan it was 9. Not 9 thousand -- 9. Anyone even attempting to infer that gun laws do not equate to public safety is putting their principles over the welfare of their own families.

Voting me wrong won't change the fact that Japan is a single-party dictatorship.

I gladly accept the annual 0.01% annual risk of being a gun homicide victim, if it means living in a nominally more democratic system than that.

Wish I were surprised people don't know this about Japan.

There are also plenty of functioning democracies (more functional than the US even!) with a low homicide rate.

And I wish I were surprised that you don't know anything about Japanese politics. Dictatorships don't hold democratic elections. Japan is holding its Upper House elections tomorrow. That's why Abe was giving a roadside speech when he was assassinated.

Yes, the LDP has been in power almost continuously since the 1950s. But another party was in power as recently as 2009 (after Abe quit the PM job the first time) to 2011.

It's not that Japanese voters don't have a choice. It's that they keep choosing the LDP. And they do that because the opposition parties are generally inept. They form and disband so often that nobody can keep track of them or what they stand for. The LDP represents stability, and Japanese like stability.

Apparently, many Chinese people don't agree with you.

yahoo.com

Former Japan PM Shinzo Abe's death celebrated by some Chinese netizens with champagne emojis

Screenshots from China’s social media platforms — WeChat and Weibo — reveal some Chinese netizens to be celebrating the assassination of Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe, even hailing the attacker as a “hero.” While s...

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.01% per year is about a tenth the risk of dying of the flu. 30,000 sounds like a big number until it's standing next to 300 million.

High homicide rates occur only in a few countries, and even then it's particular areas, like stay out of narco controlled Mexican cities.

Funny how many people seem offended by inquiry into the political background of a political assassination, instead of rehashing the media gun-scare hype. I say odds are the shooter didn't like spending his entire life in a one-party state.

Hey, if that's what you insist on believing, go right ahead. Keep the faith.

But the assassin told the cops early on that Abe's politics had nothing to do with his crime. He said his motive was that Abe was affiliated with a religious organization that he hates. Internet scuttlebutt has it that Abe was associated with the Moonies and that the Moonies destroyed the guy's family.

Well maybe you should tell the guy who did the assassinating that it was a political assassination. He doesn't seem to think so.

^ this

The United States is in no way a normally functioning democracy. Any time that a governing body is making the rules and laws that are not representative of the majority of the population’s wishes, that is not a normal functioning democracy.

Apparently shooter saw Abe as a puppet of the West.

He didn't?

What did he view it as?

From my previous comment:

But the assassin told the cops early on that Abe's politics had nothing to do with his crime. He said his motive was that Abe was affiliated with a religious organization that he hates. Internet scuttlebutt has it that Abe was associated with the Moonies and that the Moonies destroyed the guy's family.

Many Japanese don't either.

Besides, Abe had a habit of quitting when the going got tough so that others could take the blame. He quit in 2007 after his party took a huge loss in a parliamentary elections. He quit again in 2020 while under severe criticism for his handling of pandemic.

But I strongly suspect he planned to become PM a third time. After all, he hadn't yet succeeded in his main ambition, which was to rewrite the Japanese Constitution so that Japan's military wasn't shackled by it. And he still wielded enormous power within the LDP.

I do think his monetary policy, "Abenomics," which was actually just a rebranding of Ben Bernanke's quantitative easing, was on the right track. It was always going to take longer to bear fruit than Bernanke's approach did, though, because Japanese are much more financially conservative than Americans.

From the LA Times:"Public broadcaster NHK reported that he said he wanted to kill Abe for reasons unrelated to politics."

Pretty safe to say it probably was for what the shooter viewed as political reasons.

After all, who are you gonna believe, the assassin himself or the WWW pundits?