Luigi Mangione, Shinzo Abe, and Where We Go From Here

There's a lot America can learn from Japan's response to their former prime minister's 2022 murder

When an unassuming assassin calmly quad-tapped United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in midtown Manhattan earlier this month, my very first thoughts were about one, singular thing: our boy Shinzo Abe. We didn’t know what the murderer’s motivation was yet, but I (and many others) had our suspicions - this was a regular dude who was fed up with the system that had screwed him over, and did something drastic about it. What struck me was that the whole thing sounded *so* similar to the events of two years prior, when Tetsuya Yamagami pulled out his now infamous Wacky Blasting Contraption and unleashed two hardware-store-pipe barrels on the former Prime Minister of Japan as he gave an outdoor speech in Nara Prefecture. Both Abe and Johnson were powerful men, shot in the back in public. Both were killed by a previously law-abiding citizen. Both were cut down by homemade firearms. And both men’s deaths were met with significantly more apathy and conflicted emotions than would generally be expected from a 21st century liberal society. But the eventual institutional response to Abe’s murder looked very different than what we see unfolding right now in America, and it’s actually something I think we would be smart to learn from.