Jamaica: Island Gun Control Paradise

[one-eyed fat man]

Since 1974 Jamaica has had in place some of the toughest gun laws in the world. They are simply banned for anyone but the police. The penalty for unauthorized possession of even so much as a single round of ammunition is an automatic life sentence…no appeal…no parole. They set up a special court that only handles gun crime; called appropriately enough “Gun Court”. You get picked up today, and by next week you’re starting your sentence.

It’s been thirty-six years since these laws were put in place. Yet last year, Kingston, with a population of just over 800,000 had about 1,400 murders last year; most of them…by gunfire. That's almost as bad as Chicago and unlike Dick Daley, they can't even claim they're being smuggled in from Indiana.

The law can be made no tougher, unless you execute the lawbreaker. Yet it hasn’t worked. Thirty-six years, and it hasn’t worked! The police have guns. The rich and politicians have guns, or armed bodyguards. The Jamaican Army has guns. The criminals have guns. The political thugs have guns.

The ONLY group in Jamaica that has no guns: The law-abiding citizenry!

For the past week there has been open warfare in west Kingston, particularly Tivoli and Denham Town, and St Andrews between the Jamaican army, police, and drug dealer, Christopher Coke and fighters loyal to him. Coke and his henchmen have had no difficulty obtaining military grade, fully automatic weapons, RPG's and explosives despite being a tiny island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. Maybe that's because an organization sophisticated enough to smuggle cocaine and ganga by the ton could manage to do likewise with a load of Eastern bloc or Chinese ordnance.