Keeble McFarlane

The words at the head of this article come from John Lennon, the most famous of the pop group known as the Beatles, and many Jamaicans seem to have taken the message to heart. For how else can you explain the proliferation of guns in the society and the casual way in which they are used - almost in the manner of a dinner-table implement. Almost without fail, the radio newscasts and newspaper front pages serve up a daily diet of shootings, some in a quite brutal fashion.

Almost no one seems immune, even old, harmless people and children sleeping in their beds far away from the front lines of the drug and gang wars.

As a youngster the only guns I would sometimes see were rifles carried by soldiers on parade, or the odd shotgun some people used to shoot birds. Handguns were extremely rare - the only other people I saw carrying them were paymasters visiting work locations to issue the regular paybill in cash. Most policemen didn't carry guns - hardly any even knew how to use the confounded things. But somewhere around the mid-1960s, we began hearing with increasing regularity about people dying from gunshots. The epicentre was west Kingston and the nearby parts of St Andrew, and politics was the underlying cause. The young men - and it was, as it still is, almost exclusively young men - who wielded those guns were doing so to prosecute what they felt was the correct political fight, on behalf of the people they felt were the only ones to be in power. Everyone no doubt remembers the apogee of election gun violence in 1980, illustrated by that famous picture of some men running down a street brandishing huge handguns.

A big problem was that when the firing frenzy of an election ended, the men still had the guns and the political need abated. As we all used to hear from our elders, the Devil finds things for idle hands to do, and idle guns are no exception, so these guns became tools of the trade in the commission of crimes such as robbery and the settling of arguments. As the body count grew each year, the fear level increased and the levels of gun ownership, legal as well as illegal, mushroomed. Some people cowered in fear in their iron-bar-enclosed fortresses, others left the island for other countries, while others armed themselves and bought vicious dogs to try to protect their lives and property.

Some people who had moved away before the gun became a commonplace article found the whole thing bizarrely frightening. I remember a relative who lives in Canada describing a visit to another relative in St Andrew for an afternoon barbecue. As the host bent over the fire to check the meat, his shirt pulled up and revealed a gun stuck in his waist. The visitor recoiled at this rude confrontation with the reality of life in his native country, and was glad to escape to the relatively safe - for him - confines of his all-inclusive hotel.

A person with even the slightest level of consciousness will realise, if taking even the most cursory look, that a handgun is one of the most useless devices invented by mankind. It serves no purpose except to kill people. It is not intended to kill animals - that's what long guns are for. And those have a limited use, either for people who rely on them for food - less and less in the modern, agricultural world - or for those who work where big, dangerous animals live, and need the guns to safeguard their lives in case of an attack. Curiously, those people tend to be most scrupulous in using their weapons.

Where does this intense attachment to firearms come from?
As youngsters, we all used to enjoy playing "police and thief", or cowboys and Indians, and received toy guns as Christmas presents. Some of these things used a roll of paper with little bumps of explosive powder embedded in it. We loaded the roll into the gun and enjoyed the little explosions as we squeezed the trigger. Some more dangerous contraptions needed a cork stuffed with powder rammed into the barrel.

Those produced a more satisfying bang when fired. Some youngsters even fashioned their own crude version of a gun using a piece of pipe for the barrel and carving a stock from a piece of wood. A clapper or thunderbolt provided the propulsion, and a stone or bit of shaped wood served as the projectile. For some unexplained reason, girls seemed immune to these impulses, as well as a small proportion of boys. I have never fired a real gun in my entire life, using only those things you find at a fair or carnival where you try to shoot a target with a light beam and win a stuffed animal, if you succeed. I wasn't even very comfortable with the inevitable slingshot which we used to make and use to shoot birds or lizards. I hope I'll never fire a real gun even if I live to be 100 years old!

All this, of course, came from reading action comics or watching cowboy movies. The source of both these cultural influences was the United States. Jamaica has always held things American in some kind of awe, because of the proximity and the overwhelming reach of its everyday influences through manufactured goods and manufactured experiences. Not all of these influences, by the way, are detrimental, but some of our people appear to have latched on to the less edifying aspects of American life, such as that country's love affair with guns.

A few years ago, while sitting with some young fellows at a fishing beach on the south coast, I was fascinated by the ease and enthusiasm with which they talked about the relative merits of a nine-millimetre as against a magnum, and so on. And as we have come to understand from recent police reports, most of the shooting these days is perpetrated by the young. As fellow-columnist Lloyd B Smith pointed out the other day, it is difficult to explain how some of these people can even afford to buy these guns and the ammunition to feed them. It seems as if they have managed to turn on its head the old maxim that crime doesn't pay.

Almost no one, it seems, can offer a solution for this whole problem. Michael Manley tried some 30 years ago with his gun court, bringing in almost draconian laws and practices to try to stamp out the use of guns. The practice, which appears to have a life of its own, simply continued, and continues to grow. The people responsible for law enforcement rack their brains every day to try to figure out some new way to tackle the problem. I have often remarked that I wish I could invent a magnet sensitive only to guns. Then we could acquire one which was powerful enough and suspend it over the island, sucking up all those dastardly implements whose invention has not, as far as I can see, contributed anything of value to the world.

Yeah, well, a guy can dream, can't he?

E-mail: Keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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