Today:
Gun control (and drug prohibition) leads to state of emergency
Today (from CNN):
Kingston, Jamaica (CNN) — Jamaican authorities declared a state of emergency in Kingston after gang members supportive of an alleged drug lord wanted by the United States attacked at least three police stations and blockaded a large swath of the city.
Two of the police stations were evacuated after being hit with Molotov cocktails, while the status of the third was unclear.
Gang members blocked off a miles-long area of Jamaica’s capital city — mostly in West Kingston — using vehicles, sandbags, barbed wire and anything else they could find…..
From Dave Kople from five years ago:
The country that I think has the most direct application for us, however, is one that we don’t have a lot in common with, and that’s Jamaica. In response to a sharply rising crime rate in Jamaica in the early 1970s, the government imposed complete gun prohibition. In fact, possession of a bullet meant a mandatory life sentence in prison. There was a special gun court where people would be tried in secret for gun possession offenses. And in conjunction with this tremendous crackdown on guns, they also did everything else that you can imagine Oliver North or Ross Perot doing to our Bill of Rights in your worst nightmares. They had gun sweeps, drug sweeps, militarized law enforcement, the government breaking into people’s houses, with no probable cause at all, to look for illegal weapons and drugs.
Every kind of oppressive measure you could want, censorship of violent television and movies, everything you could want in terms of “let’s get really serious and crack down and get rid of all these silly constitutional liberties that are standing in the way of rough and tough law enforcement,” they did. What happened was the crime rate and the homicide rate dropped substantially for the first six months. They then started to rise again, got back to their old levels, and within a few years were far ahead of their old levels, and a few years later were at double and triple the levels which had inspired this kind of crackdown in the first place. One of the kinds of violence that increased in Jamaica was homicide by police officers. Jamaicans were getting killed by their police at a rate higher than the general American homicide rate of anybody getting killed by anybody…..
-post by Michael W. Dean
