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I take second place to nobody in my admiration of things
Japanese. Like nearly everyone I know, I own a Japanese car and
the bulk of my household electronics were crafted in the Land of
the Rising Sun regardless of what it says on the cabinet. I
believe that Japan's standards of quality control (instilled,
ironically, by American mentors after World War II) should be
everybody's standards. I favor free international trade, without
a hint of regulation or restriction, and the utterances of its
Japan-bashing opponents often make me feel ashamed of my own
country.
That said -- and it needs saying -- it's time to strangle in
its cradle a particularly vile notion being pushed on us now by
the minions of Ted Turner, that the Japanese have anything at all
to teach us about civilized conduct, violence, or the ownership
of weapons.
At issue is the sad case of a Louisiana man who mistook a
costumed non-English-speaker on his doorstep, a Japanese student
looking for a Halloween party, for an intruder, and shot him to
death. CNN and the Japanese talking heads were giving it plenty
of play before the trial, but when the shooter was acquitted,
they flew into a frenzy of America-bashing which made Joseph
Biden's gibbering diatribes on Japanese trade practices sound
lucid by comparison.
In Japan, we're endlessly informed, guns have been forbidden
since the 1500s. And there's good reason for Turner's sudden
interest in Japanese culture. England, the traditional
gun-control utopia, is falling apart. The general disintegration
of what was once the greatest civilization in history (back when
Dr. Watson was free to slip a .455 caliber "life preserver" into
his greatcoat pocket) is tragedy enough. What's even more tragic
-- and stupid -- is the perfect correlation between its
increasingly and gratuitously stricter gun laws and a
skyrocketing rate of violent crime which our media never quite
get around to telling us about.
Another thing they won't tell us about is the history of
Japanese gun control. Following their "discovery" by the
Portugese in 1542, the Japanese took to firearms rather
enthusiastically, and today, scholars still debate exactly what
made medieval Japan return, en masse, to pointy, sweat-powered
weapons and "give up the gun". Some idiots believe it was a Noble
Experiment, akin to the development of American democracy. But
are you aware of what a technically-upgraded peasantry usually
does to expensively-armored aristocrats whose ancestors have
invested whole lifetimes learning to wield cumbersome,
inefficient weapons for no other purpose than to "protect" those
peasants out of everything they've got?
Self-appointed bigwigs anywhere always have a vested interest
in disarming their potential victims. Japan's noble gangsters
(of which Hideyoshi Toyotomi was the boss in 1592) were a bit
quicker on the uptake -- and a whole lot fast-and-fancier-talking
-- than the Tammany in control of medieval Europe. Japanese
peasants let themselves be conned and threatened out of their
guns by the Al Capone of their culture, condemning themselves to
centuries of bullying by thuggish Samurai, one savage
dictatorship following another, and a state-sanctioned race
hatred and class-prejudice which today constitute Japan's
greatest problem. Finally, they let themselves be herded by
fascists into a disastrous war which ended in the obliteration of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Am I actually claiming that gun control is the ultimate
reason that two great and beautiful cities were incinerated by
American atomic bombs?
You bet I am.
Our media don't talk very much about contemporary Japanese
crime, either, but I'll give you a clue: without victim
disarmament laws, today's Japanese might not be dependent on
machinegun-toting Yokuza (for which read, "Japanese Mafiosi") for
patrolling the Ginza and making it the only safe street in Tokyo
after dark.
America's gun laws, too -- 20,000-plus of them -- are
historically rooted in race hatred and class prejudice. When you
don't like someone, however evil or irrational your reason, the
last thing you want him to have is a gun. In the 19th century,
Italians, Chinese, the Irish, and above all blacks had somehow
to be disarmed, or society's overlords (who had plenty of guns
themselves) wouldn't feel safe. Today, Turner, his wife, and
other liberal advocates of victim disarmament are notorious for
owning guns themselves, but "deeply concerned" with keeping them
out of the "wrong hands" -- meaning those of the American
productive class.
Yet the Second Amendment was written so that Americans might
never be dominated by the breed of criminals who ruled classical
Japan, and, for the most part, it's worked. And when Japanese
tourists arrive, the first thing many of them do is go out to a
target range to rent one of those repulsive implements that make
America so detestable. And when evening shadows fall, or they're
just out of ammunition, they're happy, exhausted, and not too
terribly anxious to return to a land where such marvelous toys
are prohibited.
Maybe they'll learn about gun ownership the same way they
learned about quality control. I suspect that's what Turner and
his Japanese symbiotes are really afraid of.
So shut up, Ted, you mealy-mouthed, gun-toting hypocrite.
America may be "the only country in the world that allows such
easy access to weapons", as your henchbeings are so fond of
pointing out; it's also "the only country in the world" that
enjoys formal separation of church and state (and thus avoids
violent religious conflict) -- not to mention an unfettered media
on which you've grown obscenely rich. It's "the only country in
the world" in lots of ways, and nobody's going to let you turn it
into a replica of disintegrating England, socialist Europe, or
medieval Japan.
Shut up, Jane, the same to you, squared.
Shut up, CNN and Headline News.
And with all respect, shut up, Japan.
You don't know what you're talking about.
My home on the web, The Webley Page: www.webleyweb.com/lneil/
My e-zine The Libertarian Enterprise: www.webleyweb.com/tle/
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