With all due respect, I don't think someone's race or his being of non-European extraction has anything to do with this asinine proposal. Senator Ihara is probably 3rd generation Japanese-American and would be thoroughly American, with hardly any of his Japanese family roots having little or nothing to do with his thinking processes.
People do carry cultural predilections with them even down several generations. Years ago an anti-gun team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts did a five-year study for the Justice Department. At the end of it, everyone expected the results to be anti-gun. At the time I was working at the NRA and was assigned the task of contacting the chief researcher once the study broke. Wonder of wonders, the study could easily have been written by the NRA! In fact, when I called the professor, his first reaction was: "I was wondering when you guys would call."
The gist of the study was that cultural ties ran much deeper than anyone previously thought. In short, the violent crime rates of Japanese-Japanese were almost identical with Japanese-Americans. The same was true of white Anglo-Saxon protestants and Catholics in Europe and the U.S. And all this, irrespective of gun availability. "I still don't like guns," the professor told me. "The only difference is that if I now lived in a seamy neighborhood without adequate police protection, I would consider owning a gun for the protection of my family." But, living in Amherst, he added, he did not feel that need. He also said that Japanese-Americans actually had a slightly
smaller violent crime tendency than Japanese-Japanese. Criminal justice systems, rates of incarceration, early release programs, etc., had more of an impact on a society's crime rates than the availability of guns, he said.
Interestingly, a noted constitutional scholar, Lawrence Tribes, said that despite whether Americans did or did not have a constitutional right to arms ownership (and he thought the 2nd Amendment granted that), it really didn't make a difference. What makes the difference, he added, is that Americans
think they have a right to keep and bear arms, and so it really didn't matter in the long run what the Supreme Court said.
In Anglo-Saxon tradition, men would suffer death before giving up their weapons. Invaders found that it was often easier to just let them keep their weapons if conquered rather than trying to take them away. This cultural attitude played a key role in the views of our own founding fathers. Meanwhile, the cultural views of those who want to ban everything often go back generations. One noted Jewish advocate of arms ownership wondered why so many Jews would be for arms restrictions after what they suffered in Germany. Hitler, as well as any despot, knew the advantages of disarming subject peoples. Still, Jews in Israel have much different views of being armed than their American cousins.
Since the 2nd Amendment issue centers mostly around firearms, we sometimes forget that it includes knives and other bladed weapons. Fortunately, the Supreme Court, in the recent Washington, D.C., decision, has ruled that the 2nd Amendment is indeed an individual right.
Note: "The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so." Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler's
Tischegesprache Im Fuhrerhauptquartier 1941-1942.
