From cdn-firearms@skatter.usask.ca Tue Dec 13 21:57:08 1994 From: "Frank H.RYDER" In issue 134 Ken Pisichko wrote >According to some source Jamaica is rated as the most dangerous country to >live. >Does anyone have a lead to this information source The attached file may be what you're after Ken Frank The Shooting Sports Association of Austrailia presents Boiling the Reasonable Frog A series of Articles by internationally known lawyer and author, David Kopel Part 3, Jamaica: Just imagine this. Total gun hysteria has set in and panic-stricken politicians are racking their brains for a solution. In haste they build a concentration camp and paint it blood-red to remind citizens of the fate of those who indulge in gun crime. Inside the stockade briefly dwell citizens who have been arrested on gun charges. Some are there for the possession of a single round of ammunition; others are there just for being in the proximity of someone with a gun. Within this barbed-wired, watch-towered, machine gun dominated prison, defendants are detained, tried and sentenced within a seven day period. Trials are closed to the public and the media is only permitted to publish the defendant's name, the charge, the verdict, and the sentence. There is no bail, and no jury except in capital cases. Conviction in this gun court means a sentence of indefinite detention, even for that single bullet. Later this is changed to mandatory life imprisonment. You only have to be fourteen years old to qualify. Do the people protest about all that? In fact, polls reveal popular support in the region of 86% to 89%. Of course, all that must have been sixty years ago and under a dictatorship. Wasn't it? Or is it conceivable that such a set of events would take place in the modern world? The fact is that this chilling set of events is exactly what did take place in democratically governed Jamaica as recently as 1974. Here is the story: Homicide and violent crime began to increase sharply in that country in 1965. By 1974, when a prominent businessman was murdered, the media whipped up a national frenzy for drastic remedy. As has so often been the case in other countries, nobody thought to examine the root causes of it all. If they did then they ignored or concealed it. There is littie doubt that the real reasons for lawless trends are mostly social and economic ills. Anyway, Prime Minister Michael Manley told the Jamaican people that the nation "needed radical surgery for a grave disease." He added, "There is no place in this society for a gun, now or ever." The House of Representatives moved swiftly to bring in new and tough laws. The Gun Court Act and the Firearms Act outlawed private ownership of guns and ammunition. The upper classes, however, who had always had permits, were allowed to keep one gun. The permit list (de facto gun registration) was used to seize other firearms. (This kind of confiscation also happened in Victoria, Australia, not so long ago, when .223s were seized by police after naive citizens had registered their guns.) A new prison, the blood red, barbed-wired, machine gun dominated stockade already mentioned, was set up and named the "Rehabilitation Centre" shades of old Russia. It soon became known as "Stalag 17". Is it possible to think of a "Stalag" being erected in a modern day country? Is it possible to imagine one in Australia? The Jamaican Rifle Association made it known that the disarming of ordinary citizens would eventually create a crime wave. The media scoffed at the idea, just as they do here. The new and very severe measures appeared at first to be a success. Gun control people were very pleased with the whole program. The previous year there had been 124 gun murders. In the first half of the following year homicide fell by 78%. In the second half it was 22% down. However, machetes, the all purpose work tool of banana cultivating countries, were increasingly used to kill. Murders with them rose from 99 to 144 the same year. But, even so, killings fell overall by 14%. Shooting with criminal intent fell by 52%, in the first six months; in the second half of the year it was down by 20%. Non-gun robbery also fell by 58% in the first six months, yet rose by 30% in the second half of the year. Robbery with guns fell 28% in that same year. Significantly, breaking and entering and assaults showed little change. Such conditions only lasted one year. By mid 1975 crime was as bad as it had been before and most people wanted Stalag 17 abolished. By 1978, polls revealed that in Kingston one in three adults had been robbed; in rural areas it was one in five. By 1980 violence had reached stunning proportions. 933 Jamaicans were killed. Of these, 556 were by gunmen and 234 by security forces! (Presumably the balance of 143 met their end by knife and machete.) At the same time the Gun Court had started to collapse. The causes were length of trials, limited resources of ballistics experts, non-attendance by civilian and police witnesses, inefficient services of processes for witnesses, frequent adjournments, lack of police transport, and shortage of defence lawyers. Worse still, the gun laws were seen as an invitation to murder. Human rights observers maintained that much of the killing was unjustifiable. Many were police assassinations of criminals, and some were even just the settling of personal scores. Innocent bystanders were often killed, too. The assertion that a victim of police homicide had been killed in a shoot-out was often accepted without investigation, even when no guns were produced in evidence. In some years, the rate of people killed by police in Jamaica exceeded the rate of Americans killed in USA by anyone. Excesses of police violence drove citizens to new heights of violence, claimed human rightists, because such conduct seemed to legitimise it. In his Gun Control, criminologist William Calathese wrote, "The attempt to control firearms criminals through passage of mandatory firearm legislation failed..." He continued: "...although the Act professed to deter firearm crime, it eliminated fundamental constitutional rights and sharply refocused the attention of the people from social and economic reasons for crime to the more modest hope of deterring firearm crime." It is worth noting that this is a constantly recurring theme among those writers who look into firearms control. Again and again we find legislation trying to distract the people's attention from more profound social problems, by the means of putting undue emphasis on the gun; instead of calling firearms abuse an effect of social ills, they call it a cause. "The social control functions of the Gun Court cannot be over emphasised," Calathese said; "the Act always had the potential for social control due to its oppressive legislative form since its immediate cause was the legislators, the agents of political crime, and its true purpose was not the resolution of firearm crime but, more immediately, the balance of class forces, economic necessity, and ideological pressures." Further, it was alleged, government attempted to conceal the true nature of things, "by highly developed skills of political management in propagating myths of the deterrent value of an oppressive piece of criminal legislation." In addition to that, a former Commissioner of Corrections in Jamaica, together with a consulting psychiatrist, complained that, "the Gun Court drama diverted society from the more difficult tasks of revising the judiciary and constitutional processes to deal with some of the problems that contribute to crime in the country." A United Nations criminologist asserted that the Gun Court aggravated crime because it alienated the people from the government. The severe criminal sentencing in Jamaica, especiatly the life sentencing for guns, "through its punitiveness contributed more than anything to the deterioration of the crime situation." A Commissioner for Corrections in Jamaica argued that all the criminal laws were selectively enforced. He accused the police of beating and torturing confessions out of defendants, and condemned police conduct for perpetuating the nation's cycle of violence. Many Gun Court prisoners vehemently asserted their innocence, and many of them came from underprivileged or disadvantaged classes. The Jamaican experiment, reminiscent of old fascist empires from World WarII, failed miserably. It collapsed in violence and bloodshed on both sides