An open letter to the people of Japan
by David B. Kopel
18 November 1997
David B. Kopel's book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? won the Comparitive Criminology Book Award from the American Society of Criminology. He serves as Research Director of the Independence Institue.
The tragic death of Yoshiro Hatori is understandably causing many Japanese to question the nature of American society, and its attitudes toward guns. As the author of a book which contrasted Japanese and American gun control policies, perhaps I can explain why America treats guns so differently from Japan.
In Japan, personal security is a basic reality. In the same way that Japanese (and Americans) take extroadinary steps to protect themselves from violent criminal attack.
Americans are not so fortunate. Unlike the Japanese, the Americans kidnapped slaves from Africa, and, after the slaves were freed, kept Black people in very poor conditions. Much of America's current crime is a direct result of racist mistreatment of Black people in previous years.
In addition, the American police spends an enormous amount of their resources enforcing the drug laws; consequently, there are insufficient police resources to fight violent crime.
And of course America's government-run schools are a disaster. Many students graduate from American high schools unable to read; such people often find that they cannot find a job which will pay as well as does a life of crime.
With so much crime, police protection is simply unable to protect all people at all times. In fact, under the legal doctrine of "sovereign immunity," American police forces have no legal obligation to protect people before a crime is committed; police only have the legal duty to investigate crime after it has taken place.
If the government in Japan failed to supply clean drinking water, people would find their own water. In the United States, where the government cannot provide personal security, people provide their own.
Firearms are on option that many people choose for security, and, on the whole, firearms in the hands of law abiding people make America sager than it would otherwise be. According to criminologist Gary Kleck, of Florida State University, Americans use handguns about 645,000 times a year to defend themselves against criminal attack.
About half of all American homes contain a gun, and the prevalence of guns in Amercan households plays a major role in reducing bugulary. As a result, an American burglar's chance of getting shot is about equal to his chance of getting gaught and going to jail. In countries such as Great Britain, Canada, or Australia, where people are not allowed to own guns for protection, the burglary rate is much higher than in the United States.
When American burglaries do occur, the burglars generally break in during the daytime. American burglars take the extra risk of daylight entry because they realise that if they break in at night, people may be at home, and the burglar stands a good chance of getting shot. Burglars in other English speaking countries, in contrast, are much more willing to attack a home when people are present.
Another reason so many Americans choose to own guns is the example set by government. The Japanese police almost never draw their revolvers, and instead use their expertise in judo and other martial arts to subdue criminals. In America, on the other hand, about a person a day is fatally shot by the police. The frequent use of guns by American police legitimates of the use of guns in general.
Mr. Hatori's grieving family has circulated petitions urging the American government ban the possession of guns in the home. Such a measure would be unlikely to be successful. Whenever American cities or states have enacted laws forbidding the possession of particulat types of guns, or simply requiring tha people tell the government what kinds of guns they own, Americans have refused to obey such laws. Depending on the law and the region, disobedience rates ranges from 75% to 98%.
In the case of a prohibition against owning guns in the home, at least 50-60 million Americans would refuse to comply. The American criminal justice system, which cannot even control a few hundred thousand violent criminals at present, would simply collapse under the weight of 50 million new "criminals." And, incredible as it may sound to Japanese, many Americans would shoot a policeman who came to confiscate their guns.
And perhaps even more incredibly (from a Japanese view point), the American Constitution implicitly edorses such behaviour. Americans are, in their hearts, deeply afraid of the government. The Second Ammendment of the American Constitution guarantees the right to own and carry firearms. The historical record shows that the core purpose of the Second Ammendment was to ensure that if the central government ever became dictatorial, the American people would be able to overpower it. The people who wrote the American Constitution presumed that any government that would confiscate guns would be doing so as a first step toward enslaving or murdering the people.
Indeed, many Americans would argue that the Japanese historical experience validates the importance of an armed populace. As the Japanese historian Hidehiro Sonada explains, the military was able to dominate Japan in the 1920s, '30s, and early 40s partly because "The army and the navy were vast organizations with a monopoly on physical violence. There was no force in Japan that could offer any resistance."
Many Americans would not be surprised that when Hideyoshi disarmed Japan in 1588 with the Sword Hunt, he did so because, as he put it, the possession of weapons by peasants "makes difficult the collection of taxes and tends to ferment uprisings."
And once the peasantry had been disarmed,. they became increasingly oppressed. American historian Stephen Turnbull notes that after the Sword Hunt was completed, "The growing social mobility of peasants was thus flung suddenly into reverse." Having once enjoyed the freedom to choose jobs as they pleased, the disarmed peasants were forbidden to leave their land without their superior's permission.
To many Japanese (and to the small American lobbies which advocate disarming the people), the idea that an armed populace could resist a powerful army seems preposterous. But as America learned in Vietnam, Russia learned in Afghanistan, and Japan learned in Manchuria, an armed population can wear down even the mightiest imperial army.
Indeed, the United States won its independence in 1783 after armed citizens using their own muskets, rifles, and handguns fought an eight-year guerilla war against the mighty British Empire.
The American ownership of guns is, therefire, deeply tied to American concepts of indvidualism, self-protection, and freedom from oppressive government. To Japanese, whose orientation tends to focus on the group rather than the individual, the American attitude may seem absurd or even barbaric. But just as Japanese would resent Americans who gathered petitions telling the Japanese how to run their own affairs, Americans will not change their way based on pressure from abroad. Perhaps the best path to international harmony between America and Japan is for each nation to respect other nation's basic values, and not attempt tp force one country to become like the other.
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