Whew. Good Thing They Ban Guns!
By Mitch Berg
Japanese man rams vehicle into crowded shopping area, comes out swinging a knife:
The lunchtime violence in the Akihabara district, a popular electronics and video game area, sent thousands of people fleeing.
Whew. Good thing civilians can’t defend themselves, or all hell could have broken loose!
The assault, which occurred on the seventh anniversary of a mass stabbing at a Japanese elementary school, was the latest in a series of knife attacks that have stoked fears of rising violent crime in Japan.
At the risk of being redundant, – whew. Good thing civilians can’t defend themselves, or goodness knows what would have happened!
A 25-year-old man, Tomohiro Kato, was arrested with blood on his face.
“The suspect told police that he came to Akihabara to kill people,” said Jiro Akaogi, a spokesman for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
“He said he was tired of life. He said he was sick of everything,” Akaogi said.
Wow. It would have been such a shame if an innocent, law-abiding civilian had been able to indulge his wish before killing seven innocent people.
Close call!
(Note: This incident provided as a preview of life under a Democrat-dominated government).
June 9th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Just for the record, the homicide rate in the USA is about five times the rate in Japan.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:18 am
They also have a very orderly, homogenous society, very little in the way of drug problems, and – this is big – a very dodgy sense of “rights of the accused” and a tolerance for what we’d call “police brutality” that’d curl your nose hair.
June 9th, 2008 at 9:06 am
I went to visit a buddy who worked in Fujisawa and met his (incredibly cute) girlfriend who’d had a really bad day that day. It was her third parking ticket in five years so the cops had towed her car and put it in cold storage. She had spent the entire day literally bowing before just about every cop, being publicly harangued by four levels of cops, paid massive fines, and had spent the entire timing crying. And she got off easy compared with her friend who’d had two speeding tickets in three years and had lost her license and car.
You should see what the Japanese do to anyone accused of a serious crime — they laugh at the idea of a Miranda warning. There you’re lucky if you get out of the interrogation with all bones whole. There are reasons the conviction rate in court in Japan is 99%.
To say the Japanese have a highly structured society with fanatical police isn’t putting too fine a point on the situation.
The old saw is that heaven is German engineers, French chefs, and English cops, and Hell has French engineers, English chefs, and German cops. But nobody who’s seen German cops and Japanese cops would oppose swapping Germans with Japanese.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Some say one of the issue with America is that we have too many freedoms. Or to be more accurate, we are the freeist nation in the world, and many of our citizens don’t handle that very well. Often, the law is on the side of the criminal, especially if the criminal has a good lawyer.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:47 am
I think it’s time someone filed suit against Ginsu.
June 9th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Re RickDFL’s comment, since I already have the racist rep, I may as well be the one to point out that Japan also has very few blacks. I guess that’s what Mitch meant by “homogenous”.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:52 am
Colleen, I think you are correct, to a point. If you look at the percentage of murders committed by white males the US murder rate approaches the murder rate of gun-unfriendly nations in Europe.
There are at least three objections to this point of view, however.
1-Economics matter. Poor whites commit murder at rate comparable to poor blacks.
2-Age matters. Young males commit murder at a much higher rate than older males.
3-Christianity matters. As a Christian I refuse to believe that a black human being is more inclined to sin than a white human being.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:08 am
or whites commit murder at rate comparable to poor blacks.
Actually, poor southern whites have among the highest murder rates in the country. That’d be a cultural thing; much of southern society is descended from Scots-Irish society, which has a violent streak (or so say some sociologists).
June 10th, 2008 at 9:10 am
One of the reasons the English dominated the Scots was the internal rivalry and violence between the Highland clans, and the rivalry between the Highlanders and Lowlanders. When the Reformation came to Scotland, much blood was shed in conflict between the three contending religious parties, the Roman Catholics, the Calvinists and the Lutherans. The Lutheran party was the smallest and first to be eliminated. Many Scots Lutherans fled to Scandinavia. One of my ancestors, a member of the Mac Nider sept of Clan Mac Farlane, fled to Norway “after some killings”.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:55 am
I guess that’s what Mitch meant by “homogenous”.
No homogeneous is more than that. A buddy on assignment in Japan had a kid while there. The pediatrics nurse was excited, as she liked it when Westerners had babies there. Paraphrasing: “When we get a Japanese baby we always know the hair and eye color, eye and nose shape. But when there’s an American baby born here it’s always exciting to see what combination they have!”
June 10th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I guess that’s what Mitch meant by “homogenous”.
Well, it had nothing to do with blacks, actually.
But many societies break down on ethnic lines – which is why so many of the world’s nations are synonymous with ethnicities, and why so many of those nations don’t do well with ethnic minorities (and why those minorities often trend toward being underclasses in the majority societies, and often have grievances, many of them legitimate, against the larger soceity).
Japan has the ethnic Koreans and the Ainu; France has North Africans; Norway and Sweden have Saani; Russia has innumerable peoples, many of whom in turn have other ethnic minorities; Brits have Irish, Welsh, Scots, and Cornish; Anglo Canadians have Franco Canadians; Bosnians have Serbs; Prussians have Saxons, who in turn have Bavarians, and so on and so forth. In each case, there is some sort of ethnic and cultural stress between the minorities and majorities; each society deals with it more or less well (or, more usually, badly, and by American standards quietly; honestly, how many of you knew anything about the Japanese treatment of the Ainu?)
America is the first country in the world that didn’t begin as an ethnic group’s nationalist urge.