With a homicide rate that has dramatically increased by 20 percent in 2015, and now stands at 45 homicides per 100 000 people, Jamaica has the dubious honour of being in the top 5 nations with the highest murder rate on Earth.Įven more damning, Jamaica’s homicide rate in 1973, before the gun ban, was 11.5 per 100 000. There is no place in this society for the gun, now or ever.”ĭecades later we can look at Jamaica and judge whether or not Prime Minister Manley’s War on Crime (and War on Guns) has borne any meaningful fruit. By the time we have finished with them, Jamaican gunmen will be sorry they ever heard of a thing called a gun.
No country can win a war against crime overnight, but we shall win. This entire legal travesty, which tramples the very concept of civil rights in totality, was the brainchild of a man who graced us with this pearl of wisdom: “It will be a long war. Let that sink in for a minute: if you are arrested and accused of committing any alleged firearm-related offence, you can be sent to prison for the rest of your life with no chance of parole, on a conviction based solely on the testimony of any police officer and requiring absolutely no hard evidence what so ever. If convicted by a Gun Court the guilty party will be imprisoned for life without parole. The testimony of any police officer is sufficient to secure a conviction, and corroborating physical evidence is never required.
It is what amounts to a secret court, where all suspects are tried in camera and without a jury. If this sounds menacing to you, then the Gun Court Act will be positively alarming in comparison. The Suppression of Crime Act allowed for the police and military to combine forces in order to disarm the populace: soldiers would block off neighbourhoods and the police would then go house-to-house performing warrantless searches of every building and confiscating all firearms and ammunition found. What resulted were the travesties known as the Suppression of Crime Act and the Gun Court Act. Following spikes in violent crime, Prime Minister Michael Manley enacted two far-reaching and invasive laws in a misguided attempt to contain the problem. This effectively turns firearm ownership into something that can only be achieved by the rich, well-connected Jamaican elite.īack in the 1970s Jamaica was actually a paradise: an anti-gun paradise of Fascist proportions. By today’s standards Jamaica has among the most draconian firearm legislation on the planet, and citizens cannot possess any firearms without providing compelling reasons as to why they need said firearms, and then complying with onerous, extensive, and expensive procedures in order to obtain their licences. Jamaican gun laws unfortunately resemble something closer to the infernal than the divine. “Oh Kingston Town, the place I long to be,” went the UB40 lyrics from the song of the same name, and if you allow yourself to be carried away by the daydream of tropical islands in the Caribbean, you may just think of Jamaica as Paradise. All these are things are famously and quintessentially Jamaican.
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