I have a lot of respect for the country of Japan. It's not just a beautiful place, but the people really seem to love Americans. The X bro-fest between America and Japan a while back was nothing short of amazing, especially as we're constantly told everyone everywhere else in the world hates us. That's not true.
But there are things about Japan far too many miss, especially when it comes to a discussion about their gun laws.
Every so often, Japan does come up in discussions of our domestic measures, but I came across a piece earlier where Australians are being encouraged to look to the Japanese for improving their gun laws.
Australia is often held up here and overseas as the gold standard in gun control, where, in fact, we fall well short.
Indeed, Australia barely clings to silver when compared to Japan.
In Japan, like Australia, gun ownership is a privilege, not a right, and in both countries, a firearm license applicant must ‘prove’ they need one.
The comparison ends there. The glaring difference between the two nations is that Japan really demands proof of need and of emotional competence.
Here, the ‘demonstrated need’ demanded for a firearm license boils down to a demonstrated desire to own a gun – almost anyone can get a license; hence, the 930,000 gun license holders nationwide.
By contrast, in Japan (with four times the population of Australia), there are only around 200,000 licenses issued and that must be renewed every three years.
Unlike in Australia, no civilian can own a handgun in Japan.
Beyond political will, the key difference is that gun license applicants in Japan must really prove their mental and emotional fitness to own a gun.
In Australia, you need only be without a recorded serious mental episode.
And, if you look at the numbers, Japan's gun control laws seem to work.
But Japan is a terrible role model for anything like gun control, and I'm not saying that because I'm pro-gun. See, Australia and the United States both come from different cultural origins. We're both former British colonies, but Australia was a penal colony. Granted, I'm from Georgia, which was also a penal colony — for debtors, not felons — so I'm not exactly throwing shade when I point this out.
The thing I'm getting at is that we're both rather... rambunctious. Hard-charging and hard partying, we both hold up defiance as something of a cultural virtue to some degree or another. We like it that way. Admittedly, Australia is less likely to engage in that kind of defiance than we are, but it's still part of its national DNA.
Japan, on the other hand, is very different. Culturally, the Japanese are an extremely high-trust society where respect is given as a matter of course. Not everyone plays by the rules, but even then, the crimes are less likely to turn violent. While they love American culture, this isn't something they're taking from us.
When you look at the impact of gun laws on a society, something that absolutely needs to be considered is the culture itself. Would this culture have a massive crime problem if the gun laws went away tomorrow? In the case of Japan, it's unlikely.
Plus, when you can make a gun to kill an important political figure, it would seem you could make a gun to do all sorts of other nasty things if you were so inclined.
And people aren't.
Japan is a different place. It's a different culture, and one that is a delight for many Americans who experience it. I've got a good friend, a Brit with a far more American mentality than most Brits, who lives there and loves it. It's amazing how easy it is to get along with a country we nuked. Twice.
But it's not a model for gun laws.
