October 1, 2001
More Challenges Beset World’s Leading Anti-Gun Governments
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
Reports coming from around the world just a few weeks after the United Nations made a big show of trying to deal with illegal gun trafficking shows some of the countries that led the global gun control charge having a tough time dealing with crime or controlling dissents.
One example is an Associated Press story about increased gangland violence gripping Tokyo. It features:
Brawls in popular nightspots. Shootouts in Tokyo’s swank Ginza shopping area. Underworld headquarters riddled with bullets.
As police work to contain a power struggle within one of Japan’s richest underworld syndicates, an unusual wave of high-profile gangland violence has gripped Tokyo, according to Associated Press.
Police refuse to discuss details, other than to confirm the number and locations of shootings. But experts say it underscores a larger concern—how a decade of crackdowns and economic hard times have made Japan’s “yakuza” underworld increasingly volatile, and violent.
“These are desperate times for gangs,” said Atsushi Mizoguchi, an expert on Japan’s underworld. “With the economic slump, the police surveillance, the defections, it’s blurred allegiances.”
Japan’s crime syndicates are among the world’s wealthiest, bringing in billions of dollars a year. Recent scandals have revealed close ties to Japanese police and prominent politicians, along with some of the country’s biggest banks and brokerage houses.
Their core income is from extortion, gambling, the sex industry, guns, drugs and real estate and construction kickback schemes. They are also established in stock market manipulation and high-tech sectors such as Internet pornography.
Police are reportedly now also looking into whether gangsters were involved in a fire that killed 44 people at a mahjong parlor and bar in a Tokyo entertainment district where organized crime, including both Japanese and Chinese gangs, has long prospered.
As tensions have mounted, the gangsters have been out in force.
Police Guns Debate
During this wave of violence in supposedly gun-free Japan, a model for America’s anti-gunners, the Mainichi daily news, a major newspaper in that country, editorialized about to plan to loosen police gun rules.
The National Police Agency is now undertaking a review of the regulations regarding the use of handguns by police, according to Mainichi.
The Japanese rules requiring the firing of warning shots and restricting the circumstances under which firearms may be used are likely to be relaxed. The revisions are aimed at enabling police officers to respond more quickly to emergency situations and to enhance the deterrent power of firearm possession.
Police just carrying a handgun is no longer enough to deter criminal activity; their use is increasingly being called for in many cases. A special license is required for Japanese police to drive patrol vehicles and motorcycles. But, strangely enough, no special qualifications are required for the use of firearms.
One factor behind the restrictions on gun use has been the national allergy to firearms. The police, too, have been excessively sensitive; an officer in Nagano who thrust a handgun at a member of a motorcycle gang in May last year was dismissed from the force.
Haiti
In Haiti, another country supporting the UN gun control protocol, police arrested five people at an opposition political party headquarters in August when a special weapons squad conducted a search and found guns at the office, local radio reported, according to Reuters news service.
Police spokesman Jean-Dady Simeon told private Radio Metropole that a police SWAT team raided the headquarters of the Confederation of Democratic Unity (KID) in the Port Au Prince’s Bourdon district and found two automatic firearms.
Simeon referred to the detainees as “bandits.”
KID leader Evans Paul said the arrest of his supporters was another sign the government was cracking down on opponents.
Earlier, Paul, who was tortured under a military dictatorship a decade ago, publicly forgave his persecutor, former President Prosper Avril, and accused Haiti’s current government of committing human rights abuses against Avril.
The developments heightened rhetoric between Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s ruling Lavalas Family party and his political opposition, locked in a squabble over flawed parliamentary elections in May 2000. The stalemate has held up some $500 million in foreign aid for Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas.
Haiti’s history is studded with conflict and corruption as well as gun control. Much of the recent unrest in the Caribbean nation has been linked to who owns the guns and whether or not such arms could force free elections.
France is another gun control leader, especially during the series of United Nations-sponsored conferences to promote gun control. But it has even bigger problems than the Japanese.
A drug dealer armed with a rocket launcher was shot dead by French police after he challenged them to a duel at the end of an all-night gunfight, according to The London Times.
Saphir Bghouia, 25, was killed by a police team on the morning of Sept. 2 after using a Kalashnikov assault rifle to kill an aide to the mayor of Béziers and hitting two police cars with rounds from a Russian-made rocket launcher. An accomplice made a getaway, and was being sought.
Four officers in one car escaped injury because the rocket failed to explode after it struck the trunk, sending the vehicle leaping into the air. The other car, pulverised in the explosion outside a police station, was empty.
Police chased Bghouia around the town through the night while he harangued them over his mobile phone, shouting Islamic slogans. Eventually he challenged them to face him in a “man-to-man” duel. The police accepted in a ploy to lure him to an unpopulated area. They arranged to meet him in the car park of an exhibition center in mid-morning.
Masked officers from the national police intervention force shot Bghouia dead as he aimed his rocket launcher and a rifle at them after getting out of his car. “We got the impression that he came to die in our arms,” an officer said.
Bghouia had believed that Jean Farret, the mayoral aide, was a police officer when he shot him because he was sitting in a car with a blue light on the roof.
According to The Times, France was shocked by the use of military weapons by a man who was known only as a troublemaker from an immigrant-dominated council estate of a provincial town. He had convictions for car theft and petty drug-dealing.
The all-night confrontation heightened alarm about rising crime and the increasing use of violence against the police. Five officers have been killed in separate incidents this year. Police said that arsenals of military rifles, grenades and anti-tank rockets were spreading among the youths of the housing estate ghettoes because of a plentiful supply from the wars of former Yugoslavia and Chechnya. Kalashnikov Russian rifles were selling for £300 (about $450 US) on the black market, compared with 10 times that amount only two years ago.
The gunfight brought demands for a crackdown on criminals. Daniel Vaillant, the Interior Minister, flew to Béziers and said: “Weapons of war must only be held by the military. All others must be eradicated.”
Meanwhile, across the world in Bangladesh, that Asian nation’s caretaker government tightened up controls on firearms in late August in a bid to ensure an Oct. 1 parliamentary election is free and peaceful, according to Reuters news service.
The government canceled all gun licenses issued since January and ordered the owners to surrender their firearms to authorities immediately.
The move followed allegations made by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) that most of the licenses had been issued to activists from its main rival, the Awami League, led by former prime minister Sheikh Hasina.
If that doesn’t sound like the New York City politicians who engineered the state’s Sullivan Law, nothing does.
The locales may change, but the link between gun control and power remains the same.