The Japanese national police decided to replace their old Model 60 S&W revolvers in 1995. While traditionalist elements liked the use of a non-threatening compact revolver, others advocated for a modern sidearm – essentially a semiautomatic service pistol. Trials took place in 1995, and the SIG P230 in .32ACP was a compromise choice – semiautomatic, but compact.
The version of the P230 that SIG Germany submitted to these trials had a couple unique features. Namely a manual safety (to complement the decocker and empty-chamber carrying of the Japanese police) and a lanyard loop on the left side of the grip. However, the competition remained mired in controversy after SIG was awarded the contract, and only a few thousand were actually procured. In 2006, the J-frame scandium S&W Model 360 was adopted, returning the force to its preferred snubby revolvers.
A batch of apparently overrun P230JP pistols were imported into the US for commercial sale in 1997. Interestingly, these came in two serial number ranges. Guns in the 181xxx range are marked “Made in Germany”, and guns in the 163xxx range are marked “Made in West Germany”, although both have 1997 proof codes. This suggests that a supply of leftover parts from before German reunification were used to produce the Japanese police pistols.
I am shocked, shocked, shocked that the Japanese police bureaucrats didn’t also demand a grip safety and a magazine safety too. And block the magazine to hold just five cartridges!
Bureaucrats are a global menace.
According to http://modernfirearms.net/en/handguns/double-action-revolvers/japan-double-action-revolvers/new-nambu-m60-eng/ mentioned Model 60 was designed over two years, between 1957 and 1959. so this seems like example of Japanese government slowness in replacing working solution, c.f. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/japanese-government-will-finally-stop-using-floppy-disks-and-cd-roms
In 1995, the Japanese government could have purchased similar.32 pistols for rock-bottom surplus prices. they were all over the place when government agencies worldwide switched to 9mm.
That idea presupposes common sense existing within the Japanese police procurement system. Which, from the evidence, does not appear to be “a thing”.
I’ve a friend who once had a small business going, catering to the Japanese citizens who wished to experience firearms. One of the more fascinating/surprising things about that business was just how many Japanese cops were clients, and what they’d want to do. There are some fairly “switched-on” Japanese police officers, but the sad fact is that they have to do a lot of their tactical training in Japan with airsoft, and if there were ever anything like a Mumbai attack, the odds of anyone putting up a credible resistance to the attackers is somewhere between “slim” and “not a chance in hell”.
From what he told me, he had a talk with one of his clients not that long after Mumbai, and the Japanese officer was emphatically clear on what he thought would happen if something like that went down in a Japanese city: It’d be about like a weasel in a henhouse, and it would probably take days for all the “proper channels” to unf*ck themselves to get JGSDF manpower or weapons out to deal with it. Supposedly, he’d done some checking into things where he worked, and the sad fact was that the local JGSDF base in his city didn’t even have the ammo co-located with the troops; it was all held under heavy security in a separate facility that could take hours to get to. He told my friend that he thought it would look a lot like the scenes at Isandlwana, with the quartermasters demanding proper paperwork.
I suspect that the Japanese cops might not do so well under such circumstances, and that their weapons-handling skills might not be of the first order.
that’s the point. If they deliberately want their police to carry nothing but a snub-nose or a .32 PP…why go through the troubles to develop a special model, instead of getting some CZ83/PP/Daewoo.380 off the shelf and be done with it?
“(…)why(…)develop a special model(…)”
One benefit might be that if one said fire-arm would be stolen or sell illegally it would be clear that it does come from police stock.
It must be terrible to live in a country where no one is gunning each other down…
The problem is not the locals but the ease of outsiders with bad intentions showing up.
You pay the price in other ways.
In Japan, the social conformity required to make all of the supposed “non-violence” work is just as much a killer as anything in the US; it’s just that the killing isn’t as overt.
One way or another, the system gets its due. In Japan, the price is paid one way; in the US, another. You can also tell a lot from the fertility rates; while the US one is dropping, the Japanese started down the road of depopulation a hell of a lot earlier. The overall fact is that the fertility rate in a nation is pretty much a plebiscite on the quality of life there; if people won’t have kids, then… That should tell you a lot.
Col. Cooper once observed that in Japan, with a near-total prohibition on firearms, murders are committed by more old-fashioned means, usually with edged weapons.
Then of course you have the case of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was murdered with an improvised “sawn-off shotgun” that was roughly one technical step above a pipe bomb;
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/08/13/20220813p2a00m0na027000p/8.jpg?2
There is also the cultural zeitgeist to consider. In Japan, the leading cause of death other than “natural causes” is suicide.
In Japan, a shame-based culture, aggression tends to be turned inward. As in most such cases, it’s the result of generations of cultural suppression of outward emotion. As with the Scots, the English, and the Scandinavians, the Japanese, formerly a clan-based “warrior culture”, developed elaborate social rituals to avoid killing each other off. They just went a bit farther with it than the rest.
(In Japanese, there are fifteen different ways of saying “no”, all intended to be politely indirect, as U.S. diplomats found out in the 1840s.)
This lasted until the first half of the 20th Century, after the results of which they went even more introverted. (Two A-bombs can cause that level of cultural “agonizing reappraisal”.)
If civilian gun ownership was an accurate barometer of violence, the deadliest country on Earth would be…Switzerland.
In fact, it’s Jamaica. The U.S. isn’t even in the top ten;
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country
If not for cities like NYC, Chicago, L.A. and etc (with draconian gun laws and out-of-control drug dealing) the U.S. wouldn’t even be in the top fifty.
There is a strong correlation between disarmed populations and high homicide rates. It closely tracks with the level of government corruption and organized crime activity, especially narcotics trafficking.
If you want the murder rate to go down, arm your citizenry and start hanging drug gangsters.
That seems to work pretty consistently.
clear ether
eon
Ah, the power of negative press. As to US homicides per capita over the last five years, NYC and LA no longer make the top twenty, and Chicago is way down at #17, way behind places such as New Orleans (#1!), Detroit, St. Louis and Baltimore. Also, Atlanta, Memphis, Oakland and Cincinnati are up there, along with “stand your ground” Miami. Illinois’s “draconian gun laws” might work better without the numerous straw man imports from friendly neighbors Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Iowa, and Missouri (see St. Louis, above). Agreed that crime in general is down: if you remove murder from the statistics, the USA is level with any other First World nation. https://www.statista.com/chart/9931/americas-most-dangerous-cities/
You might want to look into the veracity of those statistics…
Do note who has been running the FBI, of late, and how they’ve been ideologically captured by the statists. Also pay attention to all the other stats coming out of our wunnerful, wunnerful government: Just how many times have they had to go back and revise the jobs figures downwards, again? After the economic impact of “bad numbers” has receded?
If you still trust anything these assholes are telling us, you’re delightfully naive and trusting. Could I interest you in a bridge I have for sale in Brooklyn…? First-rate 19th Century steel, being put on the surplus market very soon… I have an “in” with the contractor, see?
You could once trust numbers given out by the government here in the US. That has not been a “real thing” since about the time Reagan left office, and it’s only gotten exponentially worse. Note how the supposed “inflation rate” doesn’t capture the actual rise in prices we’re all experiencing every time we hit the grocery store.
So, trustingly spout the “official numbers”? I’ll be laughing my ass off at you.
Demographics is waaay more complicated than that. If you listen to what Peter Zeihan has to say about birth rates, you will soon conclude that declining birth rates are tied to urbanization. On the one hand, lsots of children provide free labour on farms. On the other hand, after you migrate to a small apartment in town, more than two or three children becomes an expensive luxury in a crowded apartment. Birth rates started to decline during the industrial revolution. After birth-control became widely available circa 1970, birth rates in most industrialized countries dropped below replacement rates (2.1 children per woman).
Happy people with an optimistic outlook on the future have kids. Because they want to.
Unhappy people who are constantly stressed, and driven to distraction? They don’t have kids, and that’s because they don’t want to.
There are a million and one things going into the decision to “not have kids”. It’s the space in the apartments they can afford; it’s the money they have to spend raising the kids; it’s the fact that they would invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in those kids, only to have the government send them off to war and kill them, or recruit them away from their families through indoctrination telling them that their kind are evil.
It’s also all the little inconveniences to life that build up over the broad spectrum of things. Why should you spend the money and go to the effort, when you are told day in and day out that your kind are evil? That you’re destroying the world?
It’s the endless propaganda, if nothing else.
The statist types are going to learn over the next few decades just what the limits of their power are; they can certainly discourage things, but they’re entirely unable to do the opposite. Once they shut down the baby-making machine in cultures, getting it going again will likely prove to be a far more difficult proposition.
Fertility rates are, in a final analysis of things, a sort of plebiscite on how well a society is being run, how well it takes care of people in general. Leave them feeling doomed and purposeless because of endless BS propaganda about “climate change” and all the rest? Don’t be real surprised when they pay attention to the incentives, and “fail to reproduce”.
All of these statist assholes around the world think that there’s this endless cornucopia of population and manpower, hot and cold running people to kowtow to them and “Obey” their “betters”. What they’re going to find out is that they really cannot force participation from the general population, and that it becomes exponentially more difficult to force participation from the largest demographic they’ve managed to produce so far: The “never born”.
Don’t overlook the survival factor. Prior to about the year 1900 in the United States, Great Britain, France and other developed countries, a husband and wife might give birth to a dozen children, but three out of four would not survive past age three due to disease, malnutrition, or a dozen other factors.
For instance, an aunt of mine born in 1910 and I born in 1958 had something in common; we both contracted rheumatic fever at age four.
The survival rate for that in 1914 was eight percent; she survived a temperature of 112 F, resulting in brain swelling, and spent the rest of her life with the mentality of a six-year-old.
In 1962, due to better medical technology, the survival rate was over eighty-five percent. I ended up with a temp of “only” 108 F and the last time I took the Stanford-Binet test I checked in at 186.
The key numbers on population are the numbers of men in the primary workforce age group (16-60) and the numbers of women in the primary childbearing age group (15-45). FTR, when I was born, my father was 54 and my mother was 44.
Today, the pre-1900 U.S. “birth environment” pretty much describes that in the Second and Third World. High infant mortality but even higher mortality from ages 1 to 10.
So take figures on “birth rates” in other countries with a grain of salt. It’s the survival rate past about early adolescence that’s the important factor.
cheers
eon
The infant mortality numbers make things look a lot worse when compared against the fertility rates… Countries like China don’t count “reached adulthood” in their numbers. Their fertility numbers are based on births, not people who make it to productive adulthood.
There are reasons that the demographers are pissing themselves, worldwide.
Also, never discount fraud in the numbers. It’d be my guess that the world is probably a lot smaller than we think it is, in terms of people. When your local government gets funds from the central authorities based on headcount…? What incentive is there to tell the central authorities the truth?
Anyone taking numbers from any government at all seriously is delusional. Even our own; they’ve been lying about everything, and we’re still buying the bullshit. Which is nuts.
Reply to Kirk: As Mr. eon did not see fit to reply to me himself, I will consider his claims about the NYC, LA and Chicago murder rates to be refuted. As to your opinion, however much you don’t trust government, I think it would be difficult for twenty-three metropolitan governments to fudge their murder rates enough to knock our two most populous cities off the the top 20, and Chicago off the top 16. Reply to Mr. Warner: Were you commenting on my post or on Mr. K’s reply? If the latter, please forgive my butting in; if the former, I won’t argue with you.
“Made in west germany” was 30ish years ago almost a trade mark, in practice presenting something of exceptional quality.
Hahaha! The level of batshit stupid conspiracy on this site is hilarious! Stick to machine gun theory guys. Or go eat a local cat.
You remind me of the old song from the 80’s. “There is nothing could go wrong, there is nothing should go wrong. Repeat repeat. Repeat Repeat.” The whole song was only that. The gentlemen in this thread are voting healthy scepticism visit a visit the hosting government they live under.
And yet here you are….again.
Crime is related to the androgen receptor (AR).The AR gene contains CAG repeats that affect receptor function, where fewer repeats leads to increased receptor sensitivity to circulating androgens and more repeats leads to decreased receptor sensitivity. Fewer repeats (short) on the gene is associated with violent criminal behavior. The longer repeats is more prevalent in people of North East Asia ( like Japan). That is most important reason for Japans low violent crime rate.
Rajender S, Pandu G, Sharma JD, Gandhi KP, Singh L, Thangaraj K. Reduced CAG repeats length in androgen receptor gene is associated with violent criminal behavior. Int J Legal Med. 2008 Sep;122(5):367-72. doi: 10.1007/s00414-008-0225-7. Epub 2008 Mar 26. PMID: 18365230.
The problem with research like that is that it never really goes out and compares with the general population. Sure, those traits may be prevalent among criminal populations, but… What’s their actual prevalence in the general population? How many non-criminals share those traits, and just what else are they associated with?
It’s valuable to recall the case of James Fallon, the neuroscientist researching the traits of psychopaths; he blithely included his own MRI imagery as a part of the control, and discovered that his own brain shared an unpleasant number of features with the criminal psychopaths he was studying.
This is why eugenics ain’t ever going to work, because we mostly don’t know enough, and we also don’t work on a long enough timescale. The things they thought were critical back in the 1890s, and which they wanted to sterilize people for have mostly proven to be illusory fads; meanwhile, actual “bad genes” take generations to play out. If you want to be a human eugenicist, you’d have to somehow be able to work your project for thousands of years.
The other issue is how broadly spread human genetic behavioral features have to be across our genome; you knock out one thing, like the trait for a specific behavior, and you may well wind up knocking out a crucial gene for cancer resistance or something else. We don’t know enough about how any of this works to even begin to say what we should try to design in.
From appearances, many of the genes associated with intelligence are also associated with things like autism. You try for a superman with massive intellect, and you may well wind up with a drooling Rain Man-esque subject whose utility and ability to live on their own would be questionable.
I would really like to tell people doing this stuff to refrain from making these pronouncements when they can’t possibly know what they’re talking about. The same traits that make for violent criminals are also some of the same ones that make for good soldiers, cops, and other such people. And, since we never go looking at “normal”, I’d strongly suggest that we might want to do that, and actually try to figure out what is going on before doing “something” about those with “poor androgen receptors”.
My P230 marked W.Germany, ser #163XXX was purchased NIB for $309, which included shipping in June 2002, per receipt. Test target, etc and ridiculously huge SIG P220 box (with appropriate foam insert) & 1 spare mag. I remember speaking with the seller from the midwest by phone since he lamented “nobody wants a .32 this big when smaller 9mmPara are available…”. I would guess 2001 was the import date, since the seller also noted he sold very few by June 2002.