Dave Kopel 10-30-00 1:40 p.m. Jamaican War Zone An island of intoxicative beauty? Try again, mon. ...... The real Jamaica is no idyllic island paradise. It is a hell-hole caught in the terminal stage of what some euphemistically call "gun-control," where the life of a whole people is literally being squeezed out of it like a vise; one end of the vise is the government, the other is the criminals, and people are being crushed in-between. ...... The problem is long-standing, and is aggravated by Jamaica's gun prohibition laws. ......
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Now if this was America, the solution - or at least a distraction from the real problems - would be an easy one: more gun laws. But Jamaica played that card out when it replaced an already-restrictive gun licensing system with the Firearms Act and the Gun Court Act of 1974. The Acts provided for gun confiscation, house-to-house searches, incommunicado detention, secret trials, warrantless searches and seizures, and mandatory lifetime prison sentences for the possession of even a single bullet. The main designer of the Gun Court Act was the president of the World Federation for Mental Health, Dr. Michael Beaubrun. He insisted that the Gun Court was a scientifically designed approach to behavioral change.
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Delroy Chuck writes that while gun prohibition (technically, an extremely restrictive licensing system) was "meant to take guns off the streets, out of the hands of criminals, and to lock up and keep gunmen away from decent society," the laws had no such effect. Instead, prohibition "has taken guns out of the hands of law-abiding, defenceless citizens and made gunmen the kingpins of their communities. Decent citizens in inner city communities have great difficulty getting gun licenses or keeping lawful guns for their own protection. The violent young men who possess and control the illegal guns and offer protection to their communities become their heroes and protectors and are the main beneficiaries of the draconian legislation." Behavioral change indeed.
.... Britain and Australia show us the intermediate stages, and Jamaica shows us the terminal stage, of failing to stop the cancerous use of "gun control" as a cynical tool of political management. Here in the U.S., Americans are being pressured into submitting to allegedly "reasonable" and "common-sense" gun laws as the cure for violent crime. If you want your hometown to be more like Kingston, Jamaica, you'll support these laws
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www.nationmaster.com Map & Graph: Crime: liquidates (per capita) (Top 50 Countries)
Country Description Amount 1. Colombia 0.63 per 1000 people 2. South Africa 0.51 per 1000 people 3. Jamaica 0.32 per 1000 peop
....... 24. United States .04 per 1000 people
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