The documentary video below offers proof — if proof be needed — that gun control doesn’t work. Despite Jamaica’s “tough” gun control laws, the island nation is awash with illegally held firearms and plagued by endless “gun violence.”
Make no mistake: Jamaican gun control laws are as draconian as The Brady Campaign or Everytown would like them to be stateside. Here’s a bit of history on the subject from wikipedia.org:
The Suppression of Crime Act allowed the police and the military to work together in a novel way to disarm the people: both soldiers could seal off entire neighbourhoods and policemen could systematically search the houses inside for weapons without a warrant.
The goal was to expedite and improve enforcement of the 1967 Firearms Act, which imposed licensing requirements on ownership and possession of guns and ammunition, and prohibited automatic weapons entirely.
Firearm licences in Jamaica require a background check, inspection and payment of a yearly fee, and can make legal gun ownership difficult for ordinary citizens. The new judicial procedures of the Gun Court Act were designed to ensure that firearms violations would be tried quickly and harshly punished.
Prime Minister Michael Manley expressed his determination to take stronger action against firearms, predicting that “It will be a long war. No country can win a war against crime overnight, but we shall win. By the time we have finished with them, Jamaican gunmen will be sorry they ever heard of a thing called a gun.”
In order to win this war, Manley believed it necessary to disarm the whole public: “There is no place in this society for the gun, now or ever.”
How did that work out? Check out the documentary above or clock this from insightcrime.org:
Between January and June 10 [2017], 639 people were murdered in Jamaica, an average of four murders a day, police data revealed. This reportedly represents a 19 percent rise from last year, when the murder rate reached around 50 per 100,000, according to preliminary calculations by InSight Crime.
At the current rate, Jamaica could see around 1,450 murders by the end of the year, in a country with a similar population size to the city of Chicago (approximately 2.8 million).
Chicago’s excuse for its “gun violence”: the city is plagued by illegally-held guns imported into the Windy City from states like Indiana with “looser” gun control laws. Again, Jamaica is an island — and its gang-related, firearms-related crime rate is even higher.
Other than ineffective gun control laws, I wonder what other variables Chicago and Jamaica share that create this rough parity.