Speaker 1: Well, the pro-gun right has gone absolutely nuts after the assassination of
the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe.
Now, the assassination itself is a major, major political story.
It's been widely covered over the last three days, and there's not so much to add about
that.
It's a story of global significance and Japanese significance, etc..
And most of what there is to say about that has been said.
I want to focus on the reaction to this assassination, which was done with a firearm from the pro-gun
right in the United States who has rallied around this assassination to say, look, gun
control district in Japan and a former prime minister was assassinated.
And this proves that it doesn't matter what you do in terms of guns.
This proves that restricting guns doesn't make a difference.
And of course, they're completely wrong.
And we're going to look at the data and we're going to make an empirical case for why that
is.
Now, just to sort of set the stage, what we have learned about this assassination, this
is per NPR, political motivations have been denied by the shooter.
He told police the attack had been planned for months.
Abe was shot from behind in the western city of Nara.
While speaking at a campaign event.
Police arrested Tatsuya Yamagami, a 41 year old at the scene.
Yamagami, an unemployed former sailor in the maritime armed forces of Japan, confessed
to the killing for which he used a handmade firearm, according to police.
And that's an element of the reaction that we are hearing from many, which is, look,
even if you restrict firearms completely to the point of making them illegal, people will
just make them at home.
And we're going to get back to that.
But the most important top line thing to understand is that although there has been a killing,
this is you know, last week we had this caller who said, David, why why aren't anecdotes
okay to understand the world around us?
Anecdotes are our experience.
And the point I made was if you extrapolate from an anecdote, you often will be wrong.
And the fact that someone was killed with a gun in Japan misses the reality that the
rate of gun death in Japan is a fraction of what it is in the United States.
The numbers are actually quite stunning.
Two important bits of data.
First of all, very few people own guns in Japan.
And I think no, nobody denies that part.
In the U.S.
There's an estimate of 120 guns per 100 people that that's more than one gun per person in
the United States, whereas in Japan, at 0.3 guns per 100 people.
So that's the gun ownership rate.
And then if you continue in looking at this BBC article, you see that gun deaths in Japan
are extremely rare.
In the U.S., there are seven deaths by firearm per 100,000 people, whereas in Japan it's
0.03. Japan's rate of gun death is a fraction.
And in fact, the U.S. rate of gun death is 23,000% higher than the rate in Japan.
That's not a typo, 23,000% higher.
So then you go to, well, the person made the gun at home, so you can't prevent that.
Well, imagine if the only way to shoot someone was to make the gun at home.
Think about that, if you could.
If that was really the way if you wanted to shoot someone, you had to make a firearm in
your house.
Imagine how much lower gun violence would be because most people aren't going to do
that.
Guns are not illegal in Japan.
They're just much more difficult to obtain.
And this has worked at making the gun violence, the gun death rate almost zero.
If to buy a gun in Japan, you need to take a firearms class, pass a written exam, which
is only held three times a year.
So you can't just say, well, I want it tomorrow.
It's held three times a year.
You've got to get a doctor's note saying you're mentally fit and have no history of drug abuse.
You have to ask for a permit to do firing training that can take a month.
You have to be interviewed by police and explain why you need a gun.
You have to pass a review of your criminal history and gun possession, record employment,
involvement with organized crime, debt, relationships with friends, all these things you then apply
for a gun powder permit.
You take a one day training class, have to pass a firing test.
At that point, you can get a certificate from a gun dealer describing the gun that you want.
If you are trying to hunt, you have to get a hunting license to show I'm really getting
this.
In order to hunt you then have to get a gun safe and an ammo locker.
The police have to inspect it and make sure that it's in compliance.
You then do a final kind of overall background review.
And after that step 13 or 18, depending on whether you consider each of these things
one or sometimes two things, then you can actually go and buy a gun.
So the anecdotal reaction, this is the this is the epitome of why anecdotes aren't useful.
The anecdotal reaction is.
Strict gun laws.
And there's a shooting.
None of the gun laws work.
The systemic empirical reaction is.
Strict gun laws.
Very small rate of gun ownership.
Guns aren't illegal.
But all of this leads to a tiny, tiny rate of gun death in the country of Japan.
Yes, a person was killed with a gun and it was notable and it was a known person because
it's a former prime minister.
It's like if Bill Clinton or George W Bush were or Donald Trump were killed with a firearm,
it's it is notable.
It's major news.
But the gun violence rate is nothing in Japan compared to that of the United States.
And that really should be the big takeaway.
So I was involved in a whole bunch of different Twitter spats as this was going on with people
saying this this proves that you can't prevent gun violence.
No, actually, this proves that you can.
And in fact, this story is a major story in Japan, not only because of the person that
was killed, the former prime minister, but because anyone was killed with a gun at all,
because it is so rare in the entire country.
And Japan has a large population, I think it's about 80, 80 million.
You have to adjust for that.
It's smaller than the U.S., but that rate is tiny for a country with so many people.
And in fact, let me just double check Japan, population 125 million, actually.
So it's an even, even bigger country making the number of gun deaths even smaller.
That's the takeaway.
Their policy has worked.