Gun Control Follies: Japanese Coil Gun Arrest Shows the Signal Can’t Be Stopped…Anywhere

NHK News Japanese coil gun
Courtesy NHK News

A recent news report from NHK (link in Japanese, read with Chrome’s translate tool) shows us one of the myriad ways in which gun control laws can and have been made to look foolish.

In this case, a 29-year-old man was arrested for possessing a “coil gun,” a gun that uses an electromagnet to accelerate a chunk of metal up to speed. These guns have never been terribly effective, with even the best experimental guns accelerating the projectile up to not much better than BB gun speeds. Until just recently, Japanese law didn’t even prohibit them. The country’s gun control laws only prohibited firearms and other projectile-launching weapons, but not those using magnetic force.

After the law changed, Japanese police started looking around online (the article calls it the police’s “cyber patrol”) for Japanese people who had posted photos or videos of coil guns. Then, they’d investigate and see if they could catch someone with one. When police questioned the man in this case, he told them that he had made the coil gun back in high school, and had kept it ever since.

The NHK article says that police are currently working on a campaign to get people to voluntarily give their coil guns to the police who will pick them up or accept them if they’re turned in at police stations, so there must be a significant number of them in the country. For every coil gun police have found, there are likely thousands if not tens of thousands more of them in drawers and closets in contravention of the current prohibition.

All of which only serves to demonstrate how Japan’s gun control laws laws are readily bypassed. The best example in recent memory was the man who assassinated former PM Shinzo Abe using a home-built gun. Using nothing but pipes, homemade explosives, some shrapnel, and an electronic ignition system, a weapon every bit as deadly as one bought in a gun shop was built.

Shinzo Abe home made gun ghost gun
The home made gun used to assassinate former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (Photo Nara Shimbun/Kyodo News via AP)

Without a daily inspection of every household and business in Japan, along with the corresponding end to all privacy rights for the nation’s citizens, there’s no way to truly enforce gun control. The same obviously applies to other countries including the United States. With technologies, like metalworking, 3D printing, electrochemical machining, normal machining, and basically every other way of fabricating or making virtually anything, there are a thousand ways to build a gun, some very durable, effective, and accurate.

Ultimately, Japan, like every country on the planet, is going to have to make a choice. They can continue to ignore the reality of ineluctable technological advancement and attempt to keep the genie crammed inside the bottle. That would require self-delusion all the way to its conclusion, where all liberty is traded for a promise of security that never actually arrives. Or, they can realize that the Japanese society’s low violence isn’t due to its gun control laws, but to its social stability. If they play to their strengths instead of their fears, the country could have a lot more security against rising threats across the East China Sea.

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2 thoughts on “Gun Control Follies: Japanese Coil Gun Arrest Shows the Signal Can’t Be Stopped…Anywhere”

  1. I wonder what would happen if the Japanese were to reverse the stringent gun ban and allow citizens the equivalent of our 2nd Amendment. Interesting thought experiment on how a highly educated, homogeneous society could transition to gun ownership from a strict, outright ban.

    1. If that happened by some miracle, I would bet every dollar I own that the murder rate would not move a single percentage point.