Shooting of Shinzo Abe is a huge shock for Japan and the world
EDITORS’ NOTE: Many editorial pages, in print and online today, are comparing Japan’s rate of gun violence with that of the U.S. Japan had roughly 10 shooting incidents last year, not including suicides or accidents. Eight of those 10 shootings were traced to an organized crime group. In the same period, the U.S. has suffered hundreds, many involving mass shootings that targeted children and the vulnerable. It raises a difficult question about America’s ability to manage its freedoms: not only its insistence on those supposed freedoms but its susceptibility to untrammeled influence of lobbyists over legislators. The following report about the assassination of a Japanese leader does not answer these questions. But we hope our readers will ponder the larger questions, as they read this report, and ask “What are we doing wrong, and why do we tolerate it?”
Japan is reeling from the assassination of its longest-serving former prime minister, Shinzo Abe. He was campaigning for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party for the Upper House elections due on Sunday, in the city of Nara in western Japan, when he was shot from behind with an apparently home-made sawn-off shotgun.
The alleged assailant, reportedly a 42-year old local man, was arrested at the scene. There is no known motive at this time, but there are reports the suspect is a former member of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces.