Police agency to ban souped-up air guns

02/07/2006
The Asahi Shimbun

The National Police Agency will ban ownership of remodeled toy air guns strong enough to pierce the skin, in reaction to drive-by shootings involving these strengthened weapons, officials said.

To regulate these guns, the NPA will submit a bill to revise the Law to Control the Possession of Firearms and Swords to the regular Diet session as early as March, the officials said.

The NPA is considering a maximum prison term of one year or a fine up to 300,000 yen for those found in possession of such remodeled guns.

The owners of an estimated 800,000 remodeled air guns will be required to scale down the weapons' power at specialty shops. Air gun dealers will cover the remodeling fees, the officials said.

Japan has stringent laws restricting the ownership or use of guns, including air guns designed for hunting and competition. Toy air guns, which usually shoot plastic pellets with compressed air or low-pressure gas, are excluded on the grounds that they are not strong enough to harm people.

But these toys can be remodeled to shoot metallic projectiles at higher speeds. The remodeled toys are sold over the Internet.

A series of drive-by shootings involving those guns occurred last year.

In late September, two passenger cars in Wakayama Prefecture were shot by another driver with a remodeled air gun. The projectiles created a hole with a 5-millimeter diameter in a window of one vehicle and shattered the rear window of the other.

Similar shootings occurred in Osaka Prefecture in August and September.

The NPA will consider toy air guns with a power of 3.5 joules per square centimeter or stronger as illegal, the NPA said. That power is strong enough to make people bleed, according to the officials.

The power of the guns can be measured at specialty shops.(IHT/Asahi: February 7,2006)

www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200602070120.htmlA

thin skinned wussies, If you pull a gun on me you better kill me because all it does is make Mongo me pissed

It could break the skin, cause a nasty infection.  - Clark Griswald.

Ban everything, it's for the children.

That will teach them to bomb Pearl Harbor.

In less than 100 years they went from a proud country with martial based traditions to anime obssessed homos who fear airsoft and conduct extended searches to find a handful of lost .308 rounds.

This is just sad.

Quoted: That will teach them to bomb Pearl Harbor. In less than 100 years they went from a proud country with martial based traditions to anime obssessed homos who fear airsoft and conduct extended searches to find a handful of lost .308 rounds.

oh noez!!11!1!!

Quoted: It could break the skin, cause a nasty infection.  - Clark Griswald.

Considering some of the sex fetishes they have over there, any open wound is likely to result in an infection.

Quoted: That will teach them to bomb Pearl Harbor. In less than 100 years they went from a proud country with martial based traditions to anime obssessed homos who fear airsoft and conduct extended searches to find a handful of lost .308 rounds.

It's never been easy for Japanese people to own weapons....throughout their history. It's not like they're becoming pussified like here in teh UK, it's always been like that over there.

A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity. - Sigmund Freud

I'd say that describes Japan pretty well.

Quoted: Quoted: That will teach them to bomb Pearl Harbor. In less than 100 years they went from a proud country with martial based traditions to anime obssessed homos who fear airsoft and conduct extended searches to find a handful of lost .308 rounds. It's never been easy for Japanese people to own weapons....throughout their history. It's not like they're becoming pussified like here in teh UK, it's always been like that over there.

That's funny. One of my teachers grew up in Japan and when he moved to the US prior to turning 18 (to claim his citizenship, his father was American), he brought a virtual shitload of weapons with him.

I know there are regulations to owning swords and such but his generation (born in 1946) is hardly what I'd call pussified.

Quoted: Ban everything, it's for the children.

Ban everything & you get the sort of insanity that Japanese men tend to exhibit.  I assign this, in part, to the characteristic persistence of restrictions on nearly everything in life in that society.  Life is too expensive & too tightly controlled.  High cost of living & real-estate, generational loans...  All those high-end Japanese sportbikes  & heavy cruisers we can (currently) buy State-side are a wet dream to them; takes all kinds of licenses, "permission slips", etc. to own.  Many models are just flat illegal in the country, period.

Talk about repressed.  Probably explains the schoolgirl fetish & other forms of weirdness in the culture.

Squeeze too tightly & it'll still just leak out somewhere else.  I'd probably fall on my hari-kari sword if I had to live under such freedom-sapping conditions.  I'm sure Japanese restrictions are a radical wet-dream tomany a demoncrat.  That sucking sound you hear is freedom going down the tubes.

Meanwhile, NK and China are building up there militaries, NK still makes incursions into Japanese waters and has been known to kidnap people, Pakistanis are one of the most common immigrants, and crime is on the rise.

But civilian owned guns are strictly for hunting

At least nobody has died from airsoft yet.

I still cant get this Japan story out of my mind. Thats what gun control gets ya.