crime

2 men arrested for shooting girl with air gun from car

38 Comments

Police in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, have arrested two men on suspicion of assault after they fired plastic pellets from an air gun at a 13-year-old girl.

According to police, the two men, Kenji Ojima, 24, and Ryota Kawamura, 25, both company employees, have admitted to the charge.

Ojima was quoted as saying they did it for kicks to see the look on the girl's face when she was shot, while Kawamura said they just got carried away, Fuji TV reported.

The incident occurred at around 5:30 p.m. on Friday. The girl was walking along a street when the two suspects drove up slowly behind her and fired several pellets at her.

Police said the girl suffered injuries to her buttocks.

Police said they are questioning Ojima and Kawamura about five similar incidents in Kawaguchi between Feb 1 and Feb 3. The suspects were brought in for questioning after their car was identified through street surveillance camera footage and the girl's description of it.

© Japan Today

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38 Comments
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Idiots!

15 ( +15 / -0 )

Very sick boys ...

8 ( +9 / -1 )

Real men!

8 ( +8 / -0 )

lock them up

6 ( +7 / -1 )

wanna be yakuza

3 ( +5 / -2 )

"girl suffered injuries to her buttocks" there's seriously something wrong with those guys.

6 ( +6 / -0 )

Those BB guns can cause a lot of pain and severe bruising and can take a few days to heal. I hope she is quite fine.

7 ( +7 / -0 )

wow, scary to read news from your own city. this is very troublesome.

The police simply bought them for questioning, wonder when they are going to be filed charges for assault?!

24 yr old adults picking on 13 yr old girl. these lowlifes need a good beating.

7 ( +8 / -1 )

If only a good guy nearby had been armed with a BB gun, he could have stopped these scoundrels.

12 ( +15 / -3 )

Very relieved to see that drive-by shootings in Japan involve air guns, unlike some different country we all know about.

1 ( +6 / -5 )

Company men doing this for fun. Will they still be company men after this incident?

7 ( +7 / -0 )

Company men boys doing this for fun. Will they still be company men boys after this incident?

fixed it

2 ( +3 / -1 )

I'm going to start packing my bb-gun just in case.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

Or if they were from Laguna, they could blow each other.

-6 ( +2 / -8 )

I'm quite surprised Japanese can buy these realistic looking air guns very easily here. I believe you don't even need a permit?

2 ( +2 / -0 )

They shot her...in the @$$? What the heck is wrong with these people?

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

@papigiuliojust a big wallet the realistic ones are not cheap

1 ( +1 / -0 )

If any of my employees did that they would be terminated immediately. What a bunch of cowards!

4 ( +4 / -0 )

Uchi/Soto on steroids. In Saitama.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

@Tokyo-Engr

Harsh (illegal, too, I'd have thought). You could try firing them before proceeding to the ultimate penalty....

3 ( +3 / -0 )

I carry a real gun and know it's not a toy. I guess these clowns thought what they had could not really hurt her. It is a crime to brandish my firearm in a manner to cause alarm. Mine is on my hip and that's where it will stay unless needed. What these two did was more than brandish even though what they had was not classified as a real firearm. Knowing how strict the law on knives are they should have had more common sense about what they were doing was a criminal offence.

-6 ( +2 / -8 )

One just has to wonder how much longer JLand will survive with specimens like them running around.

... did it for kicks ...

Well, they now have a criminal record, and lost those 'company employee' positions.

I'm glad to see those 'morals lessons' sunk in...

4 ( +4 / -0 )

I've always been surprised at how you can easily buy those air guns. Twenty-five years ago, my friends and I used to have battles at the school dormitory with those. They would leave big red whelps on your body for days. And after cracking one guy's eyeglasses, we stopped playing with them. We were young and dumb. And thankfully, no one was seriously hurt. Some things should be a bit more difficult to purchase.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Only idiots point any kind of gun at another person unless absolutely necessary, whether bb gun or firearm. Good one, Matthew!

-3 ( +2 / -5 )

Im in my late 30's and still have the scare for being shot by a 2.2 air rifle when i was a teenager and i can remember the pain, cor it hurt. The lead pellet was lodged in about 2cm deep i remember i felt like a teenage rambo picking it out. Anyway, hope the girl gets the chance to shoot these man children in there soft places. Pathetic.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Throw them to the floor and strike them roughly!

2 ( +2 / -0 )

Just to clear up some confusion in the comments - an airsoft gun is NOT equivalent to a BB gun.

The airsoft guns sold in Japan (most of my male students have had one) fire soft plastic pellets that, even if shot at from three feet away will not leave a mark on skin. They're designed for children to shoot at each other (though obviously they'd never be advertised as such). Of course there are more realistic replicas that sell for high prices that adults like to collect, the underlying ammunition is the same - soft, generally harmless plastic pellets.

Being hit by an elastic band hurts a lot more. The biggest danger is of course being hit in the eye or accidentally swallowing one.

What these two idiots did was definitely harassment and they should be punished, but unlike the comments here they did NOT attack the girl with a dangerous weapon. They attacked her with a toy.

3 ( +4 / -1 )

"The girl was walking along a street when the two suspects drove up slowly behind her and fired several pellets at her."

Sounds like they been vexed, Beavis and Butthead, practicing drive by's, they've seen on US media...

1 ( +2 / -1 )

We had people (mostly young male idiots) taking pot shots in various Scottish cities - and now unless you have a licence you can't own an air weapon of any type... except air pressure super soaker type toys.

These hooligans in Kawaguchi seem to be the type who carry out what was once termed recreational violence. Lock them up in a cell with a yak for the night...

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Welcome to the new order. Immature adult males. Good luck getting laid, pals. You have been circulated.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

I think the bast punishment for these guys would be some karma, the two guys should be stripped naked put in a large room, supply the girl and her friends or parents, with some BB guns and a load of ammo, then these guys would know how painful it can be when you get shot with them especially on tender body parts.

-1 ( +2 / -3 )

2 idoit males

2 ( +2 / -0 )

Two grown men shooting a 13 year old girl for kicks. If I were the father, I would trust myself to be alone in a room with these two worms. (With apologies to actual worms.)

1 ( +2 / -1 )

No surprise where this happened. What Japan really needs to do for starters is stop selling these things all over the place. You can get them almost anywhere, and some are pretty powerful -- I see kids shooting signs (and pellet impressions -- and worse.

As for these two Saitama nutbags, lock them up for a stint and see if they get a kick out of that, too. I hope the poor girl recovers from the emotional wounds quickly.

0 ( +3 / -3 )

Funny how anytime a man/men in Japan commit random acts of violence, they target young girls. Real tough guys...

4 ( +5 / -1 )

@ Capt

I agree, and also think its a side effect for lack of a better term of men who are the majority raised by woman, dont get me wrong women do an an amazing job raising kids but boy need a male about and if he is working 60 hrs a week that aint gonna happen. J males are mostly raised by women which in my minds eye explains a lot, but its obviously good for the system to have apathetic role followers...... i digress.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

I, myself also got shot once with a BB in my bum... Even through jeans, it`s a pain not easily forgotten. Those two are some veeery sick puppies, better lock them away for some years...

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Well, I kept waiting for people's reading comprehension to catch up and it never did.

Sang Nguyen above wins the prize for actually reading the article and having a clue as to what is going on here.

These guns, to my knowledge, can do damage somewhere between a wet willie and a good wedgie, and certainly less than a noogie. As Sang says, someone shooting a rubber band at you from across the room is more likely to maim you. I am not thrilled about someone using one of these guns to shoot at anyone who is not part of some game, and twenty somethings shooting at barely pubescent girls is not cool, but it is not a felony. I am also skeptical that the girl had injuries that would be painful, much less visible.

That is AN ALLEGATION that I doubt she can prove, but she is certainly free to tell the media and create a stir. And she has done that. And certainly people are free to be outraged, but these are not BB guns or pellet guns. Let's look at the facts.

A good pellet rifle can have muzzle velocity of 500--800 feet per second. That shoots pellets, not metal BBs, and you can easily break skin or penetrate clothing or humanely end rat infestations. From what I can tell, if you are shooting metal BBs with a simple pump action gun, you are looking at only 300 fps or so velocity. That will hurt, or put an eye out (Christmas Story!), but this is about as destructive as a thrown rock or a magnifying glass on a sunny day in the hands of a child.

On just about any airsoft site you can find, you can see a description of these guns and their plastic pellets. They state that if one uses goggles, there is no likelihood of injury if one shoots a person from only 10 feet away. The muzzle velocity is somewhere around 100 fps, and the pellets are not dense or massive, and are about 3/4th the diameter of a pea. These are toys. It would be difficult to wake a sleeping dog from 20 feet away, much less injure it.

In short, whatever level of hysteria you might have about guns, and I don't particularly like them myself, don't let that blind you to the fact that some guns are just toys and some 13 year olds will cry more from hurt pride and embarrassment than from actual physical harm. A full investigation should be made of this case and people should not be jumping to conclusions.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

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