Japan has some of the world's strictest gun laws. There are only three guns for every 1,000 Japanese citizens. Yet during a campaign event in Nara on July 8, a man wielding two metal barrels strapped together with electrical tape walked up within a couple of meters of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and shot him in the back. A few hours later, Abe was pronounced dead.

One might wonder if gun control can work anywhere. But if you look at the bigger picture, Japan remains one of the safest countries in the world. This is the first assassination of a prime minister since 1936. The overall murder rate in Japan is just 0.3 per 100,000 and has been declining for years.

The assassination plot only succeeded because of the convergence of unusual circumstances. Security was almost non-existent, and the killer, who had tried to attend an Abe rally just one day earlier, managed to get right behind Abe.

The homemade gun he used wasn't powerful and couldn't make a long-range shot, so he wouldn't have succeeded had he not gotten so close. If real firearms were readily available in Japan, events like this and other mass shootings would occur much more frequently than they do.

Just look at the U.S. about one week prior. Gunshots rained down from a rooftop onto a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, killing six and injuring dozens. The gunman had legally purchased five weapons, including the high-powered one used in the shooting, despite authorities being called to his home twice in 2019 for threats of violence and suicide, as reported by the Associated Press.

In Las Vegas in 2017, a lone gunman opened fire on the crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip from his room on the 32nd floor of a hotel. He killed 58 people and injured nearly 1,000 others, according to a report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There are multiple reasons why this kind of brutality does not occur in Japan. One is because potential killers cannot access weapons that could produce such carnage.

The advent of 3D printing has opened up new possibilities for gun production. Relatively affordable 3D printers can create plastic guns that fire projectiles like a standard gun. The most basic 3D guns are miniature handguns that can fit in a pocket and remain undetected by metal detectors. A plastic 3D gun will degrade quickly, but can be used for a one-off assassination.

These homemade gun enthusiasts, like many American gun enthusiasts in general, think there should be no restrictions on their production. They like to argue that "freedom" is the most important word when talking about guns, often citing the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right to keep and bear arms—ratified in 1791. They make the contradictory arguments that any law restricting access to any kind of firearm infringes on their liberty, but also that no laws will be adequate to limit gun ownership.

The arguments don't hold up: If no laws can prevent someone who wants a gun from getting one, those laws do not restrict anyone's rights. As a practical matter, almost anyone in the U.S. can easily purchase a real wood and metal gun manufactured by a professional gun maker, so 3D printed firearms are mostly a novelty for hobbyists.

In other countries where guns are illegal, some people have been trying to print them. According to a Sky News report in June, Irish separatist groups have been carrying 3D printed firearms. Some have been recovered at crime scenes, and UK police officials have said the guns are becoming more powerful and reliable. They don't break after being used once.

But even if the possibility of printing guns exists, it can still be disincentivized and punished by law. If you see someone go to jail for illegally printing a gun, like in the 2014 case of Yoshitomo Imura in Japan, would you want to try it yourself? The police found Imura had printed five plastic guns, two of which could fire real bullets. The 28-year-old former employee of the Shonan Institute of Technology was later sentenced by a court to two years in jail for violating laws that restrict the production and possession of weapons.

Don't try this at home. 

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. This article was first published on its website

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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