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achenet

Surprising that this happened in Japan, which has very low levels of gun crime.

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How is that surprising? This was a targetted political assassination. Very little correlation with gun crime rates.

> targeted political assassination

do we really know already?

You can infer that from who the victim is and no other information. It's not exactly "was shot accidentally in a convenience store robbery".

You're right. Maybe the guy with the homemade shotgun just shot the ex-PM by accident while trying to engage in unrelated gun crimes at a public appearance of the ex-PM -- or maybe he wanted to shoot him for non-political reasons (scorned lover?). We can't know for sure that this was a targeted political assassination attempt.

> Police say the suspect told investigators that he was dissatisfied with the former prime minister and intended to kill him.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20220708_37/

how are you defining targeted?

Not really, it's almost like the negative correlation makes this possible.

America has very high rates of violent crime, and because of that, assassinating a former president would be really difficult.

It seems to have happened quite a lot. Far more so than almost any other country? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

>Far more so than almost any other country

Source for this assertion? Just Japan's page alone has more assassinated politicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Assassinated_Japanese...

You are comparing a list of presidents to a list of any Japanese politician, the wiki page you linked has mayors, governors, diplomates and at least one business man, and a few people who died before the US was founded.

And he's comparing a list of US president assassinations to absolutely nothing. So why are you calling my comparison out, when it's directly refuting his claim?

Show me the source showing the US has more assassinations than anywhere else in the world. Because a list of 4 assassinated Presidents over 300 years doesn't make that obvious to me.

Thanks in advance for your no-doubt quick cooperation to cite sources.

The American president also immediately becomes ultra famous the second they're elected in a way that most leaders don't, so they're definitely bigger targets regardless of America's crime rate.

Japan has a rather long history of political violence.

"levels of gun crime" is an irrelevant metric here. It was not even an actual gun (which probably illustrates how hard it must be to find a firearm in Japan).

>It was not even an actual gun.

I mean... I seems like a real gun to me.

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