It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Shinzo Abe, the World's Most Assassinated Man

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

In our last episode of the break we revisit the immediate aftermath of the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister and right-wing fanatic Shinzo Abe at the hands of a contraption wielding Japanese navy quatermaster.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is not happening this week because we are on vacation. So instead of normal episodes, you are getting this. And this

is our immediate reaction to the assassination of Shinzo Abe, which has turned out to be maybe the most successful modern political assassination, at least at the very least, the most successful modern political assassination that wasn't carried out by the CIA. Now, one thing to keep in mind is we recorded this episode before it was formally known that the reason that Abe was killed by the electric blunderbuss was because of his connection

to the Unification Church. Next week, actually, we are going to be getting more into that side of things but yeah have have fun with our initial reaction and uh much rejoicing at one of the most dog shit people who was alive who is no longer alive welcome to it could happen here a podcast that for the first time ever is being recorded on an earth that I no longer have to share with that fascist rap bastard Shinzo Abe. And with me to celebrate this occasion is Garrison Davis.

Oh, hi. I said hello. And James, have we actually, have we like introduced you, introduced you yet? I don't think so, no. I just pop up talking about 3D printed guns and people who hate butterflies. Yeah, yeah. This is truly a dark day for democracy. I'm saddened by the horrible loss of a great leader, a hero to feminism and women, and I guess a hero to

those who defend war crimes. So I guess before we get into one of the funniest things that has happened in maybe 20 years, James, do you want to like talk about who you are? Because you are now one of us and I'm very excited about it. Yeah, I'm one of, yeah, I'm now a podcaster. about who you are? Because you are now one of us, and I'm very excited about it. Yeah, I'm now a podcaster. So who I am? I am a journalist, I guess, and a historian. I wrote a book about the first week of the Spanish Civil War, and my PhD is in the history of international anti-fascism,

building international anti-fascist alliances through physical culture, which is very nerdy. But yeah, I love that stuff. What else? I'm British, if that had not been made abundantly clear by my accent. And I live in Southern California. Which means this episode is a majority Commonwealth episode. Yeah, that's right. Really exciting. We made it. This is now, this episode is a majority Commonwealth episode.

Yeah, that's right. Really exciting. We made it. Yeah, we'll be doing the national anthem in a minute here and we'll all just stand up. So, ex-prime minister, kind of, he's not around anymore, is he? No, he is dead as fuck so all right we should i guess we should explain who shinzo abe is yeah um okay if you want a really really long account of what the japanese liberal democratic party is because they are some of the worst people who've ever

existed uh go listen to my liberal and democratic yeah how how does how can this be so the the the very short version of this is that the liberal democratic party is a party that was founded by nobusuke kishi who is one of history's worst war criminals uh like personally responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of people in china uh he's the guy who basically he's the guy who was in charge of the economy of the fascist war machine uh like like in japan during world war ii he was the guy who uh ran like the the the sort of fascist puppet state called manchukuo that was uh run by japan after they conquered it uh real war criminal also just like personally raped a like extremely large number of people i think that like i was almost never discussed when people talk about him

yeah real piece of shit almost like like a shockingly high like number yeah like of sex crimes it's wild yeah and he's also i mean he's involved with uh the japanese military sex slave program which you will hear referred to as comfort women and i fuck i were fucking refused to call the comfort women because that is a fucking horrifying euphemism for again a program of military sex slavery uh he also was one of the people who signed off on uh unit 731 which was japan's chemical weapons testing unit where they fucking like purposely infested infected and tested chemical weapons on prisoners uh yeah he's one of the worst people ever and then he got a bunch of cia backing and some backing from the yakuza because the cia is working with the yakuza in early uh 1950s japan and he's able basically to

force all of the other uh conservative like people to join his party and the sort of the merger of the of the liberal party liberal party and the democratic party is now the liberal democratic party this is kishi's party he founded it uh he drags everyone else into it he does an immense amount of corruption he tries to bring fascism back he narrowly fails uh shinzo abe is his grandson uh the ldp liberal democratic party yeah has yeah it sucks it's like like the families the way that i've been thinking about like how do you explain this to people who don't who don't have like a background in like japanese like war crime stuff is like imagine if like one of hitler's generals had like survived world war ii and then the cia made him they made him the fucking prime minister

of germany and then and also he got more fascist because people were saying mean things about his grandpa he's like oh i don't like that they're calling him bad names i'm gonna get more fascist now so like abe abe himself he he he's carried he's been carrying out a lot of the same things that that kishi was trying to do kishi was trying to sort of restore the the sort of full fascist power of the police. Abe has been doing a whole bunch of shift of centralizing power in the executive and expanding the police's power to just arrest whoever the fuck they want. Um,

uh, so one of, one of the other things about Japan is that like legally in their constitution, they can't go to war and like both Kishi and Abe, like this is like their big fucking thing is that they, they want, they want to fully rearm Japan. They want Japan to be able go to war, because they want to do the fucking empire again. terms of like the reasons people think he's bad because he is he's like just actually a monster

is he's just like a like unfathomable degree of war crime denial like he he pulled so japan in in the 90s had admitted that they fucking kidnapped and enslaved like an enormous number of people from japan of people from korea people from china i think they also did they did in the philippines and indonesia too although there's less sort of coverage of that and like turned them into military sex slaves did things to them that are like i fucking unspeakable um and so the japanese government in the 90s had admitted they did this and apologized for it and abe was like no fuck that uh that's that's wrong he's also a part of this group called uh nippon kagai which is like a fascist group and okay so this this is this is according to a u.s congressional report what they

believe quote japan should be applauded for liberating most of east asia from western colonial powers that the 1946 1948 tokyo war crimes tribunals were illegitimate and that the killings by japanese troops through the 1937 nanjing massacre were exaggerated or fabricated oh boy uh they also openly yeah yeah yeah they also so they're nudging denialists they're uh they're they're sex slave denialists uh they openly call for the restoration of the monarchy and the institution of shinto as a state religion um abe like abe like has continually said that uh uh the the sex slaves like did it were like did were there voluntarily uh there's another thing that but but but but hillary clinton

just tweeted that prime minister abe was a champion of democracy and a firm believer that no economy society or country can achieve its full potential if you leave women behind well you know she tweeted to be fair to be fair to be fair all right both abe and uh nobu sikikishi did in fact believe in using women to fuel the economy just not in that way yeah um he also there's there's another thing that so probably the most like famous most controversial thing was so there's the shrine called the um yasukuni shrine which is it's the shrine that's dedicated to soldiers who like died serving the japanese emperor and in in this so there's this thing called the book of souls that has like lists of names right of just like the other people who died and 1068 of the people who were of the people in that

book are people who were convicted of war crimes and there are also uh 14 class a war criminals who either died or were executed who are considered martyrs there and uh abe fucking like visited there and like prayed and shit and this pissed off everyone this is like there are lots of people who have gotten mad at me already for celebrating abe's death and uh my my my official line on this is if if Abe didn't want me to celebrate his fucking death, maybe he shouldn't have celebrated the lives of the people who killed my fucking family, so fuck them. Yeah. So he's not a great

dude. He's real bad. Problematic dude. The other thing we should mention, too, before we go into the details of the shooting, is that there is an election, actually, by the time this episode drops i think the election will have happened um where there is a real chance that the liberal democratic party is going to sort of like just fucking sweep it because liberal democratic party immediately starts blaming the left for this uh

there's a whole bunch of i mean just absolutely horrifying stuff where they're blaming uh korean people who live in uh live in japan which if you know anything about japanese history uh when that stuff starts happening like in in 1923 after the kanto earthquake uh a bunch of people just started blaming koreans for the whole thing and they fucking literally exterminated almost the entire Korean population in several major Japanese cities. And so this stuff is very scary. It's possible that this is going to set off an incredible right-wing leader to Japanese politics. And there's a chance that this could be the actual thing that like full-on triggers Japan like re-arming and going back into sort of just being a pure fascist empire so this is not yeah that that part is really bad the motivation for the assassination is still at least at time of recording still slightly unclear very unclear according according to some politicians and news media we do know the suspect is

Hideo Kojima so that you can you can infer a little bit based on so yeah there's there's like french politicians and a greek news channel who are using pictures of video game developer hideo kojima and passing them off as the shooting suspect yeah which is really funny it is funny pictures of kojima like inside like a russian like communist hat fucking thing pictures of him wearing a joker shirt and standing in front of a che cavarra picture very funny and they're using this as proof that it's by a left-wing terrorist and it's actually video game developer hideo kojima it's yeah so in terms of like i guess what we know about the actual shooter um we don't know that much is a 42 year old guy who was a a former veteran of the uh of the the japanese self-defense force he was he was a navy guy

which i guess partially explains why he can shoot a gun. But yeah, the details are really murky. What we've got at time of recording is the Japanese police saying that it wasn't because of a political thing and that it was because of a group that Abe was a member of. Who the fuck knows what that means? That can mean any number of things. member of who the fuck knows what that means that can mean any number of things i i'm not going to speculate live on here because i i don't know uh yeah but also it was extremely funny and we should we should talk about the weapon that was yeah this is why this is one of the reasons why it's extremely funny and we should probably gonna hand this hand this over to James because James is a

bit, a bit more of an expert in this type of, uh, DIY weaponry. So what, what the fuck is going on with this homemade gun? Yeah, this shit.

Yeah. This shit is fucking, this shit, this is crazy. so funny. Yeah. It's extremely funny it's extremely funny that all these people with 50 000 followers on twitter who quote and quote do osin like immediately uh label this a 3d printed gun which it's not uh it does not look this gun no this gun

is being held together with duct tape like that is that that is the kind of weapon that we are dealing with here this is this is a homemade gun like held together with fucking duct tape it is extremely it is like he he got blown up by an electric blunder bus it is yeah it's like there could very well be 3d printed parts in like around it but yeah it is but it's not it's not looking it's it's not like it's not like an fgC9 or anything. No. It's a weird, like, electronic pipe duct-taped together shotgun. Yeah, it's, I think perhaps if people don't understand, we should, like, break down how firearms work broadly

and then how this one works specifically. Sure. Right? So, like, there's no reason why you should be familiar with this, but, like, you need something to explode, something to make it explode and something to go out the end and a way to make sure it only goes in one direction. Right. So what this character has done is seemingly it's yeah,

it's like a blunderbuss or a musket in that it seems to be like muzzle loaded from the front. And yeah, it's, I'm'm looking at it now and it really is just covered in duct tape uh i tweeted a picture of it it's again yeah this shit is uh it's very old-fashioned he seems to have made his own powder too like it was very very smoky which you can do i'm not gonna tell you how to do it but uh it's a thing that that is possible and so essentially from what i'm seeing here it looks like it's like a piezo electric ignition which then ignites this homemade powder that he had uh and then he's put something in a shotgun means it doesn't have rifling right so it doesn't impart spin on the projectile

so he's basically got two pipes uh a piezo electric igniter some homemade powder and then he could have put nails in then he could have put nails in there he could have put a cast lead ball uh anything bolts and this wasn't the only homemade weapon he had when police raided his house he had a whole bunch of stuff that is that look it looks out of like it looks like it's out of like fallout or something it is like there was one like blunderbuss that had nine different barrels all duct taped together it's like exposed wiring exposed circuit boards like it's it's like it's extremely janky yeah it's like i'm not entirely sure that that the nine barrel one, the central barrel isn't touched by the structural duct tape. And I'm not sure that it wouldn't have moved in one direction or the other when he fired it.

It's really incredible. Yeah, I think there's like a yoga, I can't see what, he's put something on the, he's made a buttstock with that one. So like he can shoulder it, I guess. And I don't know if that's like a piece of tire or what but yeah yeah this is not a precision weapon wooden boards but there's like some type of like reflect it looks almost like a smartphone's attached to some of the wiring or like there's there's something reflective screen that looks like it's like like an electronic control box which could could just be like an old smartphone or something.

Yeah, I wondered if he could, because that's what you use for an improvised explosive device, right? It's a cell phone to actuate it. So it could be that maybe he had a plan to just put it near where Abe was going to be and then call it and then have it go off. That would be... No, this is a much better

assassination. It has the stock so i'm guessing i'm guessing he would he would be planning to hold it because otherwise there's no reason to put the buttstock there um true yeah but who knows like this guy's operating on a different level we have no way to know what he was thinking at least at least at least not at the moment what he was thinking was i want to kill shinzo abe with my pipes and planks and he did it he's exactly whatever you think of him this man did successfully kill shinzo abe with a gun held together by duct tape it's yeah it's pretty impressive like i i think the other thing about this is kind of impressive is a he so he so he there were there were two barrels on it that each fired and he he managed to hit him from like a pretty

good distance away like we don't have there's there's no video that directly well at least not that's out yet that like directly shows the shooter we have a lot of video because abe is giving a speech right and so we have a bunch of video of like filming abe and it's and because of where it is coming from off screen like that was a pretty good distance and as best i can tell he only hit abe i don't i don't think i haven't seen any reports of anyone else getting hit so i remarkably impressed that is actually that is actually kind of slightly surprising yeah there was there was no one else hit it's like he just got the guy he was yeah it's like that that is that is genuinely pretty

rare in assassinations like basically like a homemade blunderbust cannon yeah it's like assassinations like basically like a homemade blunderbust cannon yeah it's like surprisingly surprisingly controlled and accurate yeah i've just found a picture of it with the uh cyberpunk 27 2077 logo underneath it which is pretty great oh that rules yeah this does rule uh yeah he he did manage to cause it could have just put like a large massive lead ball in it i guess um yeah whatever because i don't think it i i don't think it was one thing so the one the the one thing i could say about the the wsb know about the ammo was that like there there were like a bunch of like they're they're one of the a bunch of the reports about the injuries that he suffered we're talking about like he got hit in the back but there were also holes in his neck so okay my my guess is that there was

from there was a lot of there was a lot of blood from a lot of different places yeah my guess is it wasn't one thing then but i don't know it the everything that's kind of interesting about this is like the extent to which well okay so like he was like abby was like very clearly dead like people people had like reported him at the scene as having no vitals, and they were like, yeah, his heart stopped. And they helicoptered him to, like, what, Tokyo? Yeah, they helicoptered him to Tokyo, but the Japanese government did a very good job of making sure the press had, like, no information. And so there was just, like, it was, like, many, many, many hours where they were, like, pretending that he wasn't dead and, like, wouldn't confirm that he was dead. And he's like, this man is clearly dead as shit like he he has gotten blown

up by a blunderbuss like in the back his neck's gone his like i mean he's not gone like his neck his neck's been shot his heart has stopped and they just sort of like keep it there for for a pretty impressively long time and that's's the other thing. We know very little about what happened and why. The government's been keeping a very tight lid on information about the shooting so far. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their

journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Yeah, I guess we want to pivot into the gun control side of this sure um i guess okay so the the i mean like there was a mayor shot a few years ago yeah 2007 uh yeah a yakuza guy shot the mayor of nagasaki so like and like there's a there's been a lot of people like journalists people who are like supposedly japan experts who are like oh this is really rare in japanese culture it's like no it's not people get assassinated like like the japan has a very low rate of gun violence but of that gun violence the the the number of politicians that get assassinated is like unbelievably high and you know i mean like there have been there have been a lot of i mean like abe's

like grandfather nozuki kishi like got stabbed right after he left office like and he only didn't die because the the the guy who stabbed him claimed that he wasn't trying to kill him he was just stabbing him which is one of the weirdest things i've ever heard which i don't know i i i suspect some yakuza bullshit was going on there but yeah like i japan has assassinations um it there's there's this weird thing where people think japan is this place that's like like no violence happens like it's a completely orderly society it's like all this all this like weird stuff they made up about famously pacifist to japan yeah it's like like this this is a country like this this is a country where people like

like even in like the 70s and like even through the 80s people would charge like army convoys with sticks and like fight them like this is a country that like like people they they they have a sort of ape shit switch that just like yeah they have their fair share of like cults that do acts of violence like this they've a fair share of political extremists that do acts of violence like this and yeah like everywhere else in like like everywhere else in the world stuff just happens sometimes yeah yeah i think it is interesting that like um japan has extremely strict gun control right like, tests, background checks, prohibitions on most people owning and carrying. But like, it's kind of interesting

that this is more of a, like a first amendment question, I guess in American terms, right? Like if you're on the internet enough, I'm sure it looks like this person has just Googled how to make gun. And like, this is what came up. And so I think it's kind of fascinating that that uh that this person has been like aside from their possible connections to any

criminal networks but like i know the yakuza were selling guns to people in myanmar pretty recently so they have access to this yeah yeah and like and the the the mayor who got whacked by yakuza guy like if the yakuza is gonna do like i don't know if yakuza is gonna do a killing like they they like they they have access to weapons they would use a real gun they would use the duct tape together okay so like probably but also like i i wouldn't completely rule it out because i wouldn't rule out them just finding some guy and doing this thing the fbi does and it's like hey you're gonna go do an attack now like it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me if that if they did that as like a plausible and ideal thing but like we don't know um i still don't think we can rule out that hideo kojima is the mastermind

behind this um and it's all i mean it's convoluted enough to be a kojima i know right it is it's just a ploy to plug his next game um just have to add a few, like, nonsense names to all the people involved, like Blunderbustman, and then it's just, it's easy. Easy. But yeah, it's fascinating that this person seemingly, like, maybe had other plans or had tried several other, like, craft firearms

and settled on this one but yeah they have access to a lot of pipes that's for sure hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show where where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real,

inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters,

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

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Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you guys see the Yakuza guy who was armed dealing to Myanmar? No. No. Fucking wild.

So he was like extensively stung by the feds. So this guy, he was Yakuza. He was part of like an ongoing sting operation for like several years where he was selling, like basically like trading guns for drugs, trading guns to buy drugs. So he was selling to a couple of groups in Myanmar.mar he was uh to groups in like the tamil region uh and a couple of other people and he uh he was at least one of the people he thought was a buyer was actually a fed and they've captured all of these amazing conversations where they call the guns like cake and ice cream. And like one of the things in the criminal complaint, it's a picture of him just with like a law, like an anti-tank weapon.

And he's just like giving it like the V sign and he's wearing these like yellow aviators and a leather jacket. Like the way they arrested him was at a steakhouse, I think either in New York or New Jersey, but they lured him into a steakhouse meeting and then he got busted by the feds. But yeah, these guys were trafficking serious stuff, like surface-to-air missiles and things. They have access to some pretty heavy equipment. access to some pretty heavy equipment yeah that's a that's a pretty old like the yakuza has been sort of like i don't know how you describe it like a kind of like para arm of

the japanese state in a lot of ways for a very very long time like there are there have been like yakuza people with basically special forces training. They, at one point, like, kidnapped and killed the Empress of Korea as part of, like, a thing to, like, justify starting a war. So, they are very well hooked up. I don't know. It's still unclear to me. Because, like, that's the obviously everything. LDP has a lot of Yakuza connections because kind of, well,

okay. Partially kind of everything is Yakuza connections, but partially also because the Yakuza were like a sort of founding, like political block of the LDP in the first place. So who knows? Like LDP people have gotten like attacked by Yakuza people before. It could be that it could be something else. We sort of just don't know yet. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing identifying this guy like i'm just looking at a picture of him and there's nothing particularly sort of identifying his clothing or anything like that

yeah i guess i guess that's the death of shinzo habe extremely funny rest in peace critical support to hideo kojima and all of the other uh freedom fighters oh i guess i guess we can talk a little bit about the international response to this yeah because people have no idea what's ethnic yeah i mean like so like all the americans are sort of like are doing all american liberals are doing the like oh my god he was a good guy it's like no it wasn't this guy was a monster um okay i i will say this both the chinese and the korean embassies are being surprisingly diplomatic about it as in no one they haven't no one has actively insulted him yet i social media wise politically that's a good move for like inter-country relations yeah but like i

okay like i try japanese relationships with korea with south korea and north korea are really bad and a lot of the reason why they're really bad is specifically because of shanzuabe and because of all of his bullshit yeah so they're obviously happy but they're not gonna like rub it well i mean it's it's not clear to me that they wouldn't have done this if this had happened in like the 2010s like it's like these guys really hate each other um yeah i there's been some sort of like people i don't know people are trying to do a taiwan angle on this because abe is like a taiwan supporter but i i i don't yeah i don't think there's actually that much the people want this to have much more geopolitical significance than it probably actually will.

Yeah. Yeah, well, it's... In the meantime, yeah, fascism is dead. That's always funny. It happened. Yeah. It did, in fact, happen here. Well, it happened over there, but you know what I mean.

Yeah. It could happen here. Well, it happened over there, but you know what I mean. It could happen here. Statistically, we are about due. To be fair, you wouldn't need to resort to the duct tape model in America. No, with the amount of firearms here, it is sometimes a little surprising how little stuff like this actually happens. There's obviously a lot of work that goes into like preventing it but but still sometimes it's it's kind of it's kind of shocking um yeah like i think i think i think if you look at the last 20 years i think more japanese politicians have been assassinated the american politicians like i'm trying i'm trying to think of an american politician because

it's weird because there's a lot more american politicians and a lot of guns they they they killed they killed uh when they went after gabby giffords they killed someone i think but yeah i don't i'm trying to think of anyone else other than that um not in recent memory the guy who shot reagan is now touring uh yeah but he didn't even kill him that's not even assassination that's just an assassination attempt like yes a very botched one yeah yeah crossover between john hinkley and hideo kojima it's possible that will be the game i'm just gonna keep referring to the suspect as Hideo Kojima. It's worth noting that he did have armed guards. There were armed guards present. You can see their guns in their holsters

as they take down the person who shot him. But they were not on their A-game that day. Yeah, you can see in the video, there's one of the guys, I think, trying to get a bulletproof briefcase in between Abe and the guy and it just doesn't work. It just fails completely. They had one

job. They didn't. Operation Meat Shield. They weren't just not on their A game. They completely failed at their only job. Yeah. It's not like the guy even tried to run away he just like stood there and got arrested yeah yeah he did not really put much of a did not put up much of a fight yeah

yeah he no he didn't i think yeah he uh he went down pretty fast i guess he went with like this small again maybe to conceal it because it looks like he was pretty close yeah that is that is very likely well a very dark day for democracy um dark day for feminism um as hillary clinton said uh anyway yeah luckily they have rahm emanuel as ambassador to japan to comfort them in this difficult look the the l LDP are the only people on Earth who actually deserve Rahm Emanuel. So, look, if you didn't want to have to deal with Rahm Emanuel, you shouldn't have taken all that CIA money. This is now their curse.

Well, I'm sure we'll talk more about these types of homemade weapons and all that kind of stuff in the future, because it is interesting. And, you know, places where places where like actual firearms are harder to get we're seeing more and more shit like this popping up yeah and that will definitely be worth getting into along with

3D printed weapons alright anything else to add does that do it yeah I think that's a wrap alright well follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia. See you next time.

And critical support to Hideo Kojima. It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max.

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