GUN COURT LAW * CORNELL CAMPBELL * JACKPOT * JA
Cornell Campbell in a social comment rhythm, sounding very much like Johnny Clarke, singing about the punitive Jamaican 'Gun Courts' and 'Laws'. Three Jamaican courts handle criminal matters at the trial level. Resident magistrates try lesser offences (misdemeanours). A Supreme Court judge tries felonies, except for felonies involving firearms, which are tried before a judge of the Gun Court. The Firearms Act and the Gun Court Act of 1974 provided for gun confiscation, house-to-house searches, incommunicado detention, secret trials, warrant less searches and seizures, and mandatory lifetime prison sentences for the possession of even a single bullet. The main designer of the Gun Court Act was the president of the World Federation for Mental Health, Dr. Michael Beaubrun. He insisted that the Gun Court was a scientifically designed approach to behavioural change. According to American commentator Dave Kopel - who's analysis I agree with but who's solution I don't - "The Gun Court Act created a real mess for Jamaicans. In fact, violent crime rose so rapidly afterwards, that many Jamaicans simply fled their country. A quarter of a century of prohibitory gun laws, suppressions of other civil liberties in order to enforce the gun laws, wars on ganja, neo-colonial U.S. intervention in the ganja wars, militarised law enforcement at every level, policemen being granted a license to murder, mandatory life sentences for criminals not on political payrolls, destruction of due process, and demonization of every possible scapegoat . . . . have miserably failed to make Jamaica safer. So what's a government to do next? Why, pass an "Offensive Weapons Act", of course!" Hey, we have the very same muddled? or, pernicious, thinking over here from the labour government; but, because they are historically associated with moral good, not many people question their actions.
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