Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister since World War II and a main architect of the Pacific Rim as a premier American ally, was shockingly shot during a campaign event in Japan on Friday morning local time. Abe was pronounced dead around five hours later, and seemingly every world leader ranging from the scandal-besieged Boris Johnson to ex-U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump expressed their condolences.
That is, every world leader except for Joe Biden. The U.S. president did not weigh in with a response until nearly half a day after Abe was first shot.
After paying some lip service to Abe’s commitment to liberating trade in the Indo-Pacific region (recall that Abe managed to keep the Trans-Pacific Partnership alive even after Trump abandoned the trade deal and Biden refused to rejoin it), the president found the real culprit of Abe’s killing: gun violence.
“Even at the moment he was attacked, he was engaged in the work of democracy,” Biden wrote. “While there are many details that we do not yet know, we know that violent attacks are never acceptable and that gun violence always leaves a deep scar on the communities that are affected by it.”
The American leftists’ predilection for blaming guns as the root of all violence, rather than the failure of law enforcement to enforce the law, has bordered from hackneyed to insulting. But the assassination of Abe is no Uvalde, where fully armed pusillanimous police in Texas let children be slaughtered for more than an hour, or even a Highland Park, where the shooter himself was a walking red flag that any responsible adult ought to have stopped long before he ever possessed a firearm in Illinois. Japan has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. Japan had just 10 shootings last year, eight of which were related to the yakuza organized crime syndicate. Japanese law enforcement confirmed that Abe’s assassin made the gun that killed the premier, who became one of a handful of the year’s gun fatalities.
As a point of comparison, America has tens of thousands more gun deaths than Japan despite a population a little less than three times the size.
Abe’s death is a tragedy for democracy and capitalism around the world, and Biden’s decision to hijack his death for domestic political expedience is more than malicious. It’s moronic.
