DESPITE ongoing efforts by the United States to tackle gang violence and the trafficking of firearms to Jamaica, Deputy assistant secretary for Caribbean affairs and Haiti Barbara Feinstein has admitted that there needs to be stronger moves to deal with the issue.

“We recognise that illicit gun trafficking is an enormous problem here in Jamaica and of the broader region and that the United States needs to do its part,” Feinstein told journalists during an interview at the US Embassy in St Andrew on Tuesday.

“We offer support, as you may be aware, to the Jamaica Constabulary Force in terms of enhancing their ability to interdict guns, enhancing their forensic capacity so that they can identify where these guns are coming from, but we recognise that more needs to be done in the United States to attack this problem from a domestic perspective,” she said.

“To that end in the past year, as you may be aware, in the United States we saw the passage of the first meaningful legislation to attack gun violence quite some time and that legislation closes down some of the loopholes that enabled illicit weapons trafficking,” she said.

Feinstein stressed that through the US Government’s support to the Caribbean Community (Caricom), there is a line item dedicated to dealing with illicit weapons trafficking, as well as working with individual countries in Caricom to put together action plans.

The last official report related to illicit firearms trafficking said that of the almost 1,500 weapons seized in Jamaica between 2016 and 2018, 71 per cent came from the US.

At the same time, Feinstein explained that there is also focus on local gangs migrating to the United States.

Last month, members of a Jamaican gang were implicated in a double homicide in Florida, which left them being targeted by the Lauderhill Police Department there.

“I think gang violence is a shared problem between the United States and the Caribbean and some of the strategies that we are looking at here in the Caribbean to address it also come from interventions in the United States as well, for instance the work that has been undertaken in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles,” she said.

“Some of those methods we have also brought to bear in our programming and would look to see what lessons can be drawn from that but it is a concern and something we are looking into,” she added.