Ronald G. Thwaites | Crime, corruption and guns

The violent and confused underbelly of Jamaican culture has been on full display last week with the unfolding assertions about corruption at the Firearm Licensing Authority (FLA) and the consideration in Parliament of tougher sentences for illegal possession of a gun.

Seems that everyone in Jamaica needs a gun. It’s big business, legal or illegal. Money makes the difference. But it’s deeper than the pocket. In our confusion and mistrust, we all want to drudge the very weapon of our own destruction. For some men, their firearm is an extension (or is it a substitute?) for their loaded manhood. Even women want equal rights to firepower now. And why not?

NEED TO BE VIGILANTES

Talk the truth. Plenty of us feel that we should have the same right to bear arms as people have in America. Jamdown is our version of the Wild West, don’t?

And aren’t the guns coming in plenty-plenty and cheap-cheap anyway? It’s just a matter of who has the money or the contacts to get one. Uptown, under the charade of law, it appears to be who you know or who you can pay off; while downtown, the enforcers – lawful or from foreign or inside some cell – are the dispensers.

So will the uptown chicanery receive the same penalties as the downtown illegality? Not a chance. If Mr Dalling is to be believed, murderers and rapists with contacts and money can be forgiven and ‘redeemed’ (according to Senator Meadows), while ‘Natty Dread’ languishes at GP. Mandatory sentence, the legislature intones! No discretion! No parole! Justice, Jamaica-style!

The bottom line is that many Jamaicans are so frightened, addled or distrustful that we feel the need to be vigilantes for our own survival. Bastardised notions of freedom has meant that some can obtain multiple gun licences, courtesy of the lawful authority. Madness! You can’t build a peaceful society on Cold War tactics.

Much good having a gun did for Keith Clarke. Or for the countless women who must submit to men who go to bed with a gun under the pillow.

I acknowledge that I am afraid of a firearm and have never even held one since high-school cadet days. It is an instrument of terror and death. When stopped by the police, I often raise my hands in surrender, because in 50 years of inner-city engagement, I have seen the arbitrariness and cruelty of both official and criminal use of guns. Whoever the shotta, the blood flows equally. I am for disarming the society, except for a well-trained and accountable security force.

The politically connected gentlemen at the government-appointed and well-financed FLA are supposed to stand in the breach between lawful holders of a weapon and those hordes (“likkle yout’ who no know nuttin”, as Mr ‘City Pus’ calls them) who yearn for and possess firepower without a permit. They do not.

Offering money for guns and for informers won’t work to reduce crime. It is the job of the security forces and intelligence experts to find out how so many guns come into the country. They have not done so. How come we only arrest the ‘fryers’ and never apprehend the masterminds and financiers?

Last week, I overheard an entertainer on radio, very popular with the youth, infer that gun-running corruption has spread to the “top of the government stream”. Sadly, and dangerously, that is a popular perception. The reports about what has been happening, and reportedly still goes on, at the FLA – with no arrests, no charges, just ‘separations’ – confirm that perception. Who can have faith in that agency after this?

A need for jobs, not guns

What would put a huge and permanent dent in crime is not more guns, but for us to heed Supt Gordon of the Westmoreland police, who points to the need for jobs for the youth in the gritty Russia community. If we spent equal time in Parliament determining how to move 200,000 youth out of indiscipline and unemployment as we are doing to determine how long to lock them up for, Jamaica would be a far safer place to live.

Now that we have information that there is corruption at all levels of the gun culture in Jamaica, with the inevitable consequences of intimidation and rampant bloodletting, we should rethink our concepts of power and safety and recognise that a stand-off of armed camps can only lead to destruction and death.

In February 1972, 50 years ago, Michael Manley said that we needed “a moral and spiritual rebirth to heal the nation’s ills”. We still do. The lust for power, money and a false sense of security all combine into a deadly cocktail of crime, corruption and guns.

“Better a little with the fear of the Lord than a great fortune with anxiety. Better a dish of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it.” (Proverbs 15: 16-17.)

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.