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It seems like a lifetime ago when former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shockingly gunned down outside Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara on July 8th, 2022. The gunman, Yamagishi Tetsuya, was apprehended almost immediately by Japanese state police and local Nara Prefectural police shortly after. Abe died on the way to the hospital.
While Abe was, in my opinion, one of Japan's more better recent prime ministers, it doesn't change the fact that he was on the receiving end of a lot of corruption, like most politicians. The fact that he accepted money from the Unification Church of Korea (a church that is infamously known for swindling people of their money) definitely gave Yamagishi his (un)justified reason for gunning down Abe, as Yamagishi's mother was a victim of losing the majority of her life's savings to the church.
What makes this shocking is the fact that gun violence was the cause of Abe's death. In a country where gun violence happens only less than 10 times a year (on average) in Japan, the fact that a man could assemble a home-made shotgun, conceal it so easily in public, and then get close enough to a former prime minister to end his life, needs to remind us all that gun violence can happen anywhere.
And, as The Godfather's Michael Corleone once said in The Godfather 2...
My prediction for what will happen to Yamagishi is this. I predict that there will be a short trial where the evidence is presented against him, and he will be hung. After all, Japan's conviction rate is at 99.99%.