Martin HenryMY COLLEAGUE Delroy Chuck perhaps could use a bit of support. He has been pretty much a lone voice in the wilderness of unconcern arguing for the right of citizens to own and bear arms for self-defence.
Before I cast in my lot with this courageous 'madman', first the news: "Gunmen storm court-room, escape with prisoners." "No! No! Not in some violent, gun-filled and lawless Third World republic. This is in England in the little town of Slough, west of London. On August 3, two masked gunmen burst into a courtroom, fired some shots and freed two prisoners.
"Doctor shoots bandit dead." A man posing as a patient went to the doctor's office. The 'patient' opened a door letting in two accomplices armed with guns. Doc reached for his weapon stacked under some papers on his desk and gave his assailants a fiery dose of their own medicine. He shot the first robber directly in his face, and then opened up on the other two who managed to flee although they were likely shot. The doctor had been robbed before along with his patients and had recently relocated to a 'safer' area. That was in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, last week.
A few weeks ago, armed men held up a shop in rural Jamaica and shot to death a resisting patron. The gunfire alerted a brave licensed firearm holder who challenged the hold-up men and wounded one of them who is now in police custody after turning up at hospital for treatment.
After the Dunblane school massacre in Scotland, the British Government quickly enacted more stringent anti-gun legislation. That raid a couple of weeks ago on the heart of their justice system, the courtroom, should forcefully teach them and us what the evidence has always shown: Denying law-abiding citizens legal access to arms does not stop criminals from acquiring and using guns.
Where was the police when gunmen invaded Dr. Jameel Mohammed's office in Port-of-Spain and that shop in the backwoods of Jamaica? Where will they be when Jamaican citizens are further disarmed when the Offensive Weapons (Prohibition) Act becomes law as it almost certainly will? Delroy Chuck wrote, "Citizens need better weapons and more efficient means to secure and defend their families and properties, without having to resort to the area dons, security firms or the police."
In a high murder rate environment, this sounds like the ravings of a lunatic. But ask the people in the most violence-prone areas of this country who are best qualified to judge: arms constitute a major deterrent against attack and a means of defence. In a situation where state security has virtually abandoned these poor, suffering people and communities, they have openly and repeatedly expressed the need for arms.
But that is clearly a situation of social pathology which I am not by any means condoning. What about the person in his house, walking in the street, or in his business place uptown and in the country, the 'safer' areas? Does he or she have a right to self-defence?
The Jamaican Constitution explicitly recognises the right of the citizens to 'security of the person' and to 'the enjoyment of property.' A question of fundamental importance is whether the citizen should be obliged to surrender his security of person and the protection of his property exclusively to the state. Self-defence and access to the means of defence are fundamental constitutional and human rights issues.
Only 1.5 per cent of the Jamaican population hold legal firearms, but, by police estimates, up to 15 per cent may have access to illegal arms. The fewer people who have legal guns, the easier it is for criminals to target them.
And now the Government is pushing to take away any and every other instrument deemed to be an 'offensive weapon' as arbitrarily determined by the Minister and his police. Offensive weapons include "any article made or adapted for use for causing injury to the person or which is intended by the person having such an article with him to cause such injury."
The anti-weapons lobbies are hoping against the evidence that disarming populations will lead to a reduction of crime. Evidence to the contrary is plentiful and objectively impressive, but not to people driven to irrationality by increases in the number and mindless viciousness of crimes. For them, the problem is the weapons, so the obvious solution is to disarm citizens.
David Kopel, Director of the Second Amendment Project at the Independence Institute in Colorado, is one person who has carefully studied the issue.
A few years ago, Kopel cited data from an analysis of crime patterns in all 170 US cities with populations greater than 100,000 with 19 different types of gun control regulations. No evidence was found that restricting gun ownership reduced the crime rates for five different crimes.
Gun-control laws
Crime has been driven down in New York City in record-breaking per cent without any recourse to draconian gun and weapons control laws. Standard techniques of zero tolerance, deterrence, detection and punishment have worked like a charm in the hands of a determined Mayor and police chief.
Back in 1978, the Carter administration gave a major gun-control research grant to sociology professor James D. Wright and colleagues. Wright was on record as favouring much stricter controls. But four years later the report which had carefully surveyed all available research, was forced to conclude that there was no "persuasive scholarly evidence that America's 20,000 gun-control laws had reduced criminal violence."
The same Wright in another study found that gun-control laws had no effect on the ability of criminals to obtain guns, something that we in Jamaica could have told him for free. In the same study, 74 per cent of prisoners interviewed agreed that "one reason burglars avoid houses where people are at home is that they fear being shot." Kopel has marshalled the evidence that legal gun ownership does in fact reduce crime.
Florida liberalised its gun control laws in 1987. Contrary to fears that Florida would become the 'Gunshine' state, crimes there fell below national averages. Up to December 1995, 315,000 new permits had been issued, and only 5 were revoked because the holders had committed a violent crime with a gun.
To cite a non-US example: Israeli citizens can be quite heavily armed, but, barring the clashes with the Palestinians, gun violence is so low that the easy assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin came as a shocking surprise.
Delroy, I take my stand with you on the losing side. I must confess my intense personal dislike and fear of arms and violence of any kind. But I am constrained to rise to the defence of the right of free citizens to personally and forcefully protect their God-given, inalienable rights to life and property, as pointless as that defence may be now.
But everywhere the paternalistic state is expanding, regulating, controlling and reducing citizens to being helpless wards of the state. And the people are willing to surrender both their rights and responsibilities to the state as being too onerous to them to bear. The public silence on this latest encroachment of the Jamaican Government is deafening, but not surprising.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
