Martin Henry I WANT to sincerely thank New York reader Winston L. Stewart for his response to my column of Thursday August 17 'Defending the right of self-defence'. Mr. Stewart's response was published as "Facts behind New York City's drop in crime" in a letter to the editor on Monday, August 21. His letter raised several points and provided another useful perspective on crime reduction in the major metropolises of the United States.
I can raise only a few controversial issues with Mr. Stewart, arising from his letter. If Farrakhan's Million Man March largely a Black event is first and foremost the cause of the reduction of crime, is it not fair to conclude that Blacks are a major cause of crime in the USA? Yet US Blacks have expended a lot of time and effort resisting that criminal label. Is Mr. Stewart not providing confirmation of the 'fact'?
Guns are dangerous. Mr. Stewart writes "It is well documented that hundreds of family members, mostly children, have been accidentally shot by guns in homes, usually by another family member." Would Mr. Stewart care to fill in the numbers of injuries and deaths caused by automobile accidents, fire, drowning at home, electrocution at home, prescribed drug overdose, poisoning at home, illegal drug overdose, suffocation, physical abuse, falls, injury by machinery? Feel free to extend the list.
The motor car is far and away the most dangerous instrument of avoidable accidental injury and death for the general public and for family members. Guns, like cars, do not cause accidents. We are less than honest if we discount the crime prevention value of guns and of weapons of defence in general.
In one study, University of Chicago Professor of Law, John Lott, estimated from the observed trends that if all US states without concealed carry laws in 1992 were to adopt such laws, there would be in the region of 1,800 fewer murders and 3,000 fewer rapes in the US.
Is Mr. Stewart prepared to argue that more family members have been hurt or killed by guns than those protected from external harm in a messy and imperfect world? I must also point out again the established fact that denying citizens legal arms does not prevent criminal access to arms. The global illegal trade in arms ranks right up there with the drug trade. Whatever can practically be done to really restrict criminal access to arms can be done without recourse to denying citizens legal arms.
Mr. Stewart says, "maybe Messrs. Henry and Chuck believe the environment in Jamaica is reminiscent of the Wild West days of the US." Most people get their 'facts' about the 'Wild West' from the wild imaginations of movie makers. The 'Wild West' would have been considerably wilder without the six-shooter. One of the real historical facts of the Wild West was that arms were used overwhelmingly to impose a measure of law and order and to provide a measure of internal security in white frontier communities. The law was literally a six-shooter on the hips of law-abiding citizens at a time when states were not even organised with state governments.
The sheriff was just a fellow citizen that a local community appointed to lead in security matters, not unusually on a part-time and rotational basis.
It is true that fairly small pathological enclaves of Jamaican (and US) society are like the Wild West of the movies. But even in these enclaves the slaughter rate would be considerably higher without a balance of arms.
As I said last week, I am neither condoning nor defending that terrible social pathology. But what is most needed is moral rejuvenation, as Mr. Stewart is claiming for the Million Man March, not tougher policing (with abuses), or fewer guns which is well nigh impossible to achieve anyway.
But I have deeper interests (and arguments) than the practical usefulness of implements of self-defence. My real interest is in the right of self-defence itself.
Most citizens have forgotten that a police force is a civilian force of fellow citizens, not an army of occupation. The earliest forces in urban Britain were volunteer forces in which any able bodied man could serve on rotation to protect fellow citizens and his own home and family.
In the Jamaican situation, we saw a resurrection of this approach to policing in Michael Manley's Home Guard Movement. There are visible retentions in the District Constable, the election one-day police, and in the legal provision for citizens' arrest which hardly anybody knows about and nobody uses nowadays.
What then is the constitutional, or other legal or rational justification for concentrating police powers exclusively in the hands of a 'professional', full-time police force, which is essentially para-military. I contend, Mr. Stewart, that the expansion of police powers (an index of the expansion of state power) must mean ultimately the diminishing of the powers and freedoms of the citizen. How much is enough? And where do we stop in the progression towards a 'democratic' police state in which the citizen is nothing but a defenceless monkey kept safe in a cage?
20,000 illegal guns in Jamaica
I heartily agree with Winston Stewart that the laws in Jamaica are adequate. The inadequacy of enforcement is, however, a powerful, pragmatic reason for exercising the right of self-defence. Mr. K. D. Knight and the Jamaican Government, like the US Congress, in reality can write no law which can compel the citizenry to give up their right to self-defence. This right is built into the very biology of living animals, humans not least of all. People will simply live outside the law as so many are now doing without being 'criminals' as such. By police estimates, for example, there are some 20,000 illegal guns in Jamaica. If there were just one gun-related crime per weapon, there would be 20,000 such crimes per year! It is clear that the vast majority of guns, despite our high murder rate, are not being used to commit crimes. They are being held for something else. Self-defence by deterrence, perhaps? So is the multitude of non-firearm 'offensive weapons.'
Part of the adequacy of Jamaican law, Mr. Stewart, is the constitutional entitlement to the "fundamental rights and freedoms [including] life, liberty, security of the person, [and] the enjoyment of property. " To entrust the security of these rights exclusively to the police functions of the state in denying citizens the right to self-defence, I argue, is foolhardy in the extreme. But as I argued last week, this is firmly the trend of the future in the great and small 'democracies' of the world. I am very conscious of being engaged in a losing battle. The battle is already lost to unbalanced emotion, and to a deep-seated belief among the intelligentsia which controls public policy in the goodness and omnicompetence of an ever-expanding paternalistic state.
On a personal note I am by nature and choice a pacifist who cannot easily squash a cockroach. But I am also a pragmatist in the real world peopled by the descendants of Cain and Seth.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
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