Of my article arguing against the president’s attempted political point-scoring in response to the assassination of Shinzo Abe, Kevin asks, “If we must keep score, isn’t this a point for the side that argues that draconian gun-control laws such as Japan’s don’t actually stop crimes of this kind?”

Kevin shares my distaste for this sort of point-scoring, but the president started it in his statement and doubled down on it in spoken remarks earlier today.

It is worth asking what the president is trying to say here. If Japan, a country with virtually no privately owned firearms, still struggles with “gun violence,” then there’s simply no hope for gun control. With some notable exceptions, Democrats generally insist that they don’t want to ban guns; they only want to enact “common sense” measures to moderately restrict gun ownership.

Biden: “This is not about taking away anyone’s guns. . . . I respect the culture and the tradition and the concerns of lawful gun owners.”

Biden: “And again, for any of the press in here, the press listening: This doesn’t violate anybody’s Second Amendment right. There’s no violation of a Second Amendment right.”

Biden: “I’m a gun owner. I own two shotguns. . . . We used to like to skeet shoot. . . . There are more gunowners in Delaware because there are duck hunters . . .”

There aren’t a lot of duck hunters in Japan (they invented a different kind of duck hunting). Japan does not have an equivalent to the Second Amendment. Japan does not have a culture or tradition of private gun ownership. If Democrats are looking to propose Japan-style gun regulations in the United States, they will be met with immediate rejection, including by many of their own voters who, as Biden acknowledges, are themselves hunters and gun owners.

Even putting aside the matter of propriety in responding to the assassination of the former leader of a close ally, Biden’s comments don’t score the points he wants them to — which is another reason he should not have made the comments in the first place.