Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe Assassinated
Abe was campaigning for a candidate in Nara. The country will hold elections on Sunday.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe died after someone shot him twice during a speech in Nara, located in western Japan.
The assassination took place two days before the national election.
Japan’s longest-serving leader was shot by a 41-year-old man who approached him from behind at around 11:30 a.m. as he was speaking in front of Kintetsu Railway’s Yamato-Saidaiji Station, police said, adding he collapsed on the ground after two shots were heard. He was rushed to a hospital with blood seen on his shirt.
A doctor with the Nara Medical University Hospital later said at a press conference that Abe was pronounced dead at 5:03 p.m. and the wound was deep enough to reach his heart, adding the cause of death is believed to be blood loss.
The police arrested Nara resident Tetsuya Yamagami at the scene:
The suspect was formerly a member of the Maritime Self-Defense Force, apparently for about three years through 2005, according to government sources.
“It’s not a grudge against the political beliefs of former Prime Minister Abe,” the Nara prefectural police quoted Yamagami, whose recent occupation remains unknown, as saying. His home was later searched by the police, who found an item that could be an explosive, they said.
Yagmagami supposedly told authorities “that he was dissatisfied with former Prime Minister Abe and wanted to kill him.”
Abe was campaigning for the Liberal Demoratic Party, the country’s ruling party. He went to Nara “to support a candidate running in Sunday’s House of Councillors election.”
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida condemned the attack:
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, after returning to his office in Tokyo by helicopter from Yamagata Prefecture where he was campaigning, condemned the shooting of the former leader “in the strongest possible terms.”
“The barbaric act that took the life of former Prime Minister Abe during (campaigning for) an election that serves as the foundation of democracy should never be tolerated,” he said.
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A tragedy in every sense of the word.
We must not allow them to win
Abe was a good man and will be missed.
The gun control folks are going to be scratching their heads on how to spin this one as Japan has some of the tightest gun control laws in the world and the shooter reportedly used a home-made gun.
The lead CNN.com story has a photo of the guy mid-apprehension and you can see he has just dropped the gun… it definitely appears home-made…. lots of duct tape, clunky parts, etc. Looks to me like it may have been 3D printed.
Looks like it was made from stuff at Home Depot
I hav a far, over 100 acres, and am constantly buying building supplies. While the price of black pipe was slightly higher at Home Depot, their fittings were a whopping 40% higher. The same is true for much of what they sell. It pays to shop for decent prices.
Seems someone ignored their gun laws.
They made their own gun with stuff you can buy at Home Depot. The gunpowder might have been taken from fireworks, who knows how long that took.
That’s what I was thinking. The gunpowder obviously came from fireworks so the assassin had to stockpile enough that could create two blasts.
I, errr, ‘heard from a friend’ who used to make explosives as a kid, that you can easily get a large amount of powder by cutting open bottle rockets with an exacto-knife.
I made a small bazooka with aluminum cigar tubes, an empty CO2 cartridge filled with match heads, and a 1″ pipe launcher. Later I switched to a zinc-sulfur propellent.
Match heads work as a propellant. So does black powder, which was available from sporting goods stores. And before I could buy black powder, a mixture of sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal worked. Thank God for the Poor Man’s James Bond and similar Delta Press publications!!
Yeah, I “heard” about a “friend” who “may” have done similar stuff in our neighborhood when I was a kid. As I recall, he may have had a July 4th birthday.
They?
Japan has one of the lowest rates of violent crime on planet Earth. It is to gun control what Switzerland is to gun ownership.
The common denominator in both countries is the societal values and the people. They also don’t have a mixture of races with strife.
I agree 100%.
The point of the comment however was to debunk the implication that Japanese gun laws caused this tragedy they didn’t (if they did you would see high levels of violent crime there as you do in places like Chicago).
“Japan has one of the lowest rates of violent crime on planet Earth.”
So does the USA if you take out the top ten democrat controlled cities…
This is horrible news; PM Shinzo Abe was a good friend to us. He should have lived a long and full life. PM Shinzo Abe’ s assassin has dishonored all of Japan and I hope his countrymen deal with him appropriately.
So many suspects. China? Yakuza? Commies? His rival in the LDP who is now PM? just a random frustrated crazy person?
Nah, seems like a disgruntled Japanese man. There are a lot of those in their society.
Deja Vu all over again.
As of this moment, Trump was among the first to offer his condolences. A couple of Brandon’s cabinet members have also commented. Nothing yet from Brandon. What an imbecile. Embarrassing.
And leave it to the self-centered Leftists in the White House to use this to argue for gun control. Tell me, the guy built the gun from scratch so unless you’re going to be giving everyone lobotomies don’t know how a law can stop a guy from making a gun.
Stop giving them ideas.
As long as Harbor Freight sells drill presses and bits, home made guns will exist. And the drill presses are cheaper and faster than a 3-D printer, and less complicated.
And you can build a gun that will fire more than a handful of times before falling apart, like the current-generation 3D printed guns will do.
That’s the bit that confuses me about the paranoia around 3D printed guns.
All you need is a metal tube the right diameter and something to accelerate the projectile. The rest is just fluff and convenience.
For the left, it’s a ceaseless battle to take our guns away from us. So when a new way to get/make a gun appears, they will try to squash it, even if it’s an inferior type of gun (today). They want us to have zero guns. In their ideal scenario, only criminals will have guns, and that will make us completely dependent upon government for our very safety.
I was in Lowe’s yesterday to buy a ball valve. Their entire rack of pipe nipples had been relabeled either “80% barrel” or “80% bomb.”
“Their entire rack of pipe nipples…”
+100
I meant the lobotomies.
And the end product is harder to trace.
They will use this to outlaw 3-D printers because someone “might” use them to print a gun.
Just establish a FPL, Federal Printer License, Problem solved and raise some money. /s
I don’t think the gun was 3-D printed though. It literally looks like something MacGuyver would build out of spare parts in his garage.
Hey! I’m currently having dental implants and inlays which are made by 3D printing! The results are amazing.
Gonna have to put a serial number on those.
They probably do, many implanted medical devices already have serial numbers.
I’m sure you mean “printer control”….there are a lot more 3d printed materials in everyday use now than you know.
They are not going to let Trump win…
He was only 67
I think it would be more accurate to call this a “directional bomb” rather than a gun. Or maybe “hand-held Claymore mine”?
I have a background in gunsmithing as well as improvised weapons/munitions.
I’ve looked at some decent quality pics of the gun. It has two barrels, and it loads from the muzzle. Both barrels are made of galvanized pipe with a screwed on end cap at the breech end. The barrels are attached to what appears to be a 2×4 with some kind of tape.
It has a grip presumably made from wood and wrapped with the same kind of tape. The ignition system consists of a nicad or Nimh 7.2 volt “stick pack” battery commonly used in R/C model cars, and some airsoft guns. The trigger is a simple switch.
There are wires that go into the breech of each barrel where there must be a nichrome wire/heating element to ignite the propellant. There was a lot of smoke in the video I saw, ruling out smokeless gunpowder. The propellant was possibly home-brewed black powder or powder sourced from commercial fireworks.
I saw no 3D printed parts. The gun is crude, but obviously effective and would not be terribly difficult to build. Projectiles could be anything. Ball bearings would be my guess.
It would be annoying to build, I think. The hardest part would be ensuring ignition of the powder.
Electrical ignition with commonly available high resistance wire is actually fairly simple to achieve, and it’s reliable in this application. Far simpler than traditional percussion ignition that requires a cap/primer and a striker or hammer to fire the primer. With electric the only moving part is the switch used to complete the circuit.
Estes rocket igniters.
The igniter is also very easy to make.
Exactly. Estes rocket ignitors are what I used in my electric ignited homemade devices.
“…there must be a nichrome wire/heating element to ignite the propellant…”
I’ve seen blackpowder set off with nothing more than bare wire. Granted that was plugged into a wall socket, but still, the assassin’s weapon may have been even cruder than you assumed.
Yep, that would work. I know a guy who owns a small .45 caliber black powder cannon replica and he uses model rocket ignitors to fire it.
I’m not trying to minimize the evil this man did, but it actually is an engineering marvel he made a functional gun out of basically a scrap pile of junk. Just imagine the work he could have done on armaments had he not done this act.
Well, he used to be in the Japanese Navy so he probably picked up some things there.
“an engineering marvel”
No, it’s not at all. Excluding his powder creation from whatever source*, everything else needed is sitting in my basement to make a crude but effective shotgun. For ammunition, a bunch of ten penny nails cut into 3/16 lengths will do just fine.
*I have powder, and can make a crude gun powder if needed, but I don’t have fireworks on hand which is what it appears he used.
Most people can’t create a functional gun out of spare parts lying around their house. That’s what makes it an engineering marvel.
RIP, Prime Minister Abe.
Shinzo Abe was a good man we all will miss him. In addition to generally being on our side who else would have decided to step down while extremely popular and powerful solely because he felt his health didn’t allow him to do the best job possible?
Unlike the United States there are no federal agencies to run interference on behalf of a political narrative in Japan so the information that will come out will be reliable.
Truly awful. Heart goes out to the people of Japan and Abe’s family.
This is just so sad
What a horrible world it is right now
Seems as if the world only gives a few years of respite from insanity and then evil takes over for endless years over and over and over
The peace of my childhood now just a memory, paid for in with the blood of my father and his brothers in arms.
It just seems it’s going to get much worse before it has that small window of bliss once again…
Mr. Abe seemed to be a fine man and a friend of this country.
Rest in Peace, Mr. Abe.
This, the mass shooting in a Copenhagen mall, the Muslim terrorist shooting up a French theater, Anders Breivik’s shooting at the Socialist youth camp, and gun use in IRA terrorism during Northern Ireland’s troubles have been syunticickly proven to be fake news. The strict gun laws in all of those countries make such events impossible. sarc off
Trump hatred runs deeper than any level imaginable. The media has turned Abe’s death into a “deserved” act because… Trump
Look at headlines; their pivot from guns to Trump is vile.