About a year ago, I wrote about Japan and how they're having a problem with bears in some of its cities. The answer was, naturally, to allow people to shoot the bears before they could hurt anyone. An insurance company even started offering insurance to cover damage caused by stray bullets. Considering how densely packed Japanese cities can be, it was a good idea.
However, it seems that the problem hasn't gone away.
Why? Because some people are more than a little nervous about pulling the trigger in a crowded city street.
Japan is known for having some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. Last year, the country gave municipal mayors the power to order emergency bear shootings, but the resulting tensions show just how difficult it is to pull the trigger in crowded neighborhoods.
According to an Environment Ministry tally, the measure, which was enabled last September by a law revision that lifted a longstanding ban on shooting in residential areas, had been used 72 times in 12 prefectures by June -- about 80 percent of these uses in urban areas.
But mayors still face tough calls in neighborhoods packed with homes and shops, where stray bullets and ricochets could put residents at risk.
GUNS UNUSED
"We have done our best, but regret that we failed to produce results," Fukushima Mayor Yuki Baba told an impromptu press conference a day after a bear escaped despite an emergency response after it attacked four people in early June.
They used a tranquillizer dart on the bear, which eventually woke up and escaped, because sure. Why not. Considering this is also where the Fukushima reactor was that melted down, we cannot definitively rule out that this was a mutant bear with human intelligence, but it probably wasn't, and it escaped because some people are dumb.
However, there's a deeper problem here, and that's hunting in general.
Japan's gun laws don't make it easy for someone to take up hunting. Yes, hunting is legal for Japanese citizens, but when there's no real gun culture to speak of, there's often little interest in hunting, and that is likely why there was a bear problem in the first place, and part of why there's an issue in implementing this program here and now.
Under the framework, municipal employees or hunting club members with hunting licenses carry out the actual shooting.
The Japan Hunters Association said about 57,000 members held a first-class hunting license for rifles or shotguns in fiscal 2024, a roughly 70 percent decline from fiscal 1994.
The Toyama prefectural government on the Sea of Japan plans to subsidize necessary costs for buying hunting guns and to hold training for new hunters this fall.
But "It takes 10 years to become capable of shooting a bear, so we cannot expect them to be deployed right after training," a prefectural official said.
To put the numbers into perspective, Japan has a population of 123 million people. Texas has a population about a quarter as large as Japan's, but has between 1.1 and 1.8 million hunters.
In other words, the problem is that the bear population hasn't been culled through natural hunting, and that means they're likely to wander into cities looking for food. Since humans are smaller and have no natural weapons, such encounters don't tend to work out well for the squishier, non-clawed mammals.
Again, the gun laws don't help. The whole "10 years to become capable of shooting a bear" isn't because bears are that difficult to shoot, but because Japanese law dictates that people have to have a shotgun license for 10 years before they can get a rifle license. It's not about hunting skill, but a draconian gun control scheme that discourages hunting in general.
Now, they're paying for that, and while they're all very upset that innocent people are being killed by bears, it seems that they haven't quite woken up to the reality that they caused these problems with their gun control laws and how it discourages the very pastime that might have prevented it.
And some morons want to make hunting difficult here, all while ignoring what's going on in Japan.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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