On the evening of Oct 17, 1992, a 16-year-old high school exchange student named Yoshihiro Hattori, thinking he was attending a Halloween party, rang the wrong doorbell of a house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Bonnie Peairs opened her door to behold an unfamiliar Asian dressed to resemble John Travolta doing a dance outside. Her reaction was to run shrieking to her husband, Rodney, to bring his .44 Magnum revolver. Confronting the intruder, Peairs shouted a warning -- "Freeze!" -- and when the youth, failing to understand the term, kept walking toward toward the door, Peairs aimed for center mass at a distance of less than two meters and pulled the trigger. He then locked himself in the house until the police arrived 40 minutes later. Hattori died in the ambulance from exsanguination.

Based on the argument that Peairs had stood his ground in defense of his home, a jury acquitted him of criminal conduct; but he subsequently lost a civil suit in 1995, and Hattori's parents were awarded $650,000. A supermarket worker, Peairs could only pay a fraction of that amount. Out of remorse, he vowed he would never own a gun again.

Does time heal all wounds? Perhaps not for Hattori's high school classmate Keisuke Nishikawa, who told Tokyo Shimbun (Oct 28) he had also gone to study in the U.S. one year after Hattori's death and while there, took part in local campaigns for stricter controls on guns, collecting signatures for a petition. In November 1993, the U.S. Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act -- better known as the "Brady Law" -- requiring gun purchasers to show identification when purchasing firearms at gun shops.

In March 1994, however, Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura, two Japanese university students at Marymount College in Southern California, were shot and killed during an attempted carjacking. Soon afterwards, the weekly magazine Shukan Gendai went so far as to run an article with the acerbic headline: Amerika de korosarenai tame no ikikata oshiemasu (Here's how to avoid being killed in America).

For a while it appeared that the U.S. was making headway against the spread of firearms, but with the election of conservative Republican George W Bush and 9/11, the law was rescinded. America's current president has not shown interest in supporting new restrictions.

When Tokyo Shimbun asked Nishikawa -- now age 43 and a company employee -- to comment on the recent mass shootings in Las Vegas in which 58 people were killed, he remarked, "Nothing changes. I guess these shootings will just keep going on forever."

Another friend of the late Hattori, 41-year-old Ryohei Kasai, went to the U.S. under the same AFS exchange program, where he studied in Washington state. He, too, took part in the signature-gathering activities, although members of the host family with whom he was staying refused to sign.

"There's nothing bad about Halloween," he tells the newspaper. "But every year when this season comes around, I'm reminded of Hattori-kun. There was a person who wanted to enjoy Halloween, but he couldn't. I would like for people to recall that for a moment."

"There are some kinds of foreign 'culture' that we can't understand, but that doesn't mean we don't respect them," said Akiyuki Minami, Hattori's former high school rugby teammate and now a company president. "I also understand that the gun issue in the U.S. is difficult to resolve. I think Americans do want to resolve it somehow. It's too bad they haven't been able to get things moving in earnest."

© Japan Today