… all nations – even Japan, with its incredibly low gun ownership/gun death rates – will have to assume that a madman with a gun lurks somewhere at even modestly significant public events.
If this can happen in Japan, it can happen anywhere. Grim as it is, public officials in most of the world are going to need American-level security, or something close to it. The guns have won.
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The killings used to creep up on you, didn’t they? A mall shot up in Copenhagen, a woman walking her baby on the upper east side shot pointblank in the head… You take each instance in (keeping vaguely in mind, to be sure, that in places like Chicago and Tijuana everybody’s shooting everybody else to death day and night) and there’s a shudder and a disbelief and a disgust and then you move on. Only gradually does it occur to you that it’s now everywhere and all the time – the bangbangbang of people killing other people with guns. The panic my friend Steve experienced when he realized his wife was on the same street as the shooter here in DC, on Upper Connecticut Avenue… When I heard his voice on the phone hours after the shooter killed himself — that was I guess the moment for me. No more waving off all the gun killing as somehow peripheral to me. What world do I think I’m living in?
July 8th, 2022 at 10:25AM
True, but I think political assassination is a category that predates all these others, and even predates guns. The Secret Service has been around for over a century in recognition of this rather longstanding threat.
July 8th, 2022 at 11:36AM
Rita: I guess I’m just registering a remarkable increase in political threats/injuries/assassinations. Once your president has expressed satisfaction at the idea of his vice-president being killed, the game’s really, really on.
July 8th, 2022 at 4:27PM
Yeah, but I don’t think the Japanese are influenced by that. The motivations for political assassination are pretty obvious and longstanding. Politicians and rulers have always been targets and have always known it, hence bodyguards going back to antiquity. Shooting up random strangers for vaguely political reasons (not even for THEIR expressed political beliefs, which the shooters don’t know or care about, but which at least has some precedent) seems like something really new.
July 8th, 2022 at 9:27PM
Yes – what’s striking and scary to me is this increasingly popular psychotic/nihilistic murdering (often mass murdering). Thoreau’s famous statement – The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation – must in our time be updated. The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation until they reach a breaking point and kill everybody.