The recent massacre in Midtown Manhattan which left four people dead, including an off-duty policeman, again brings gun control under the microscope.

The killing, committed by a young male who travelled all the way from Nevada to New York, armed to the teeth, demonstrates how ineffective each state without border control having their own gun laws can be.

Nevada has a very liberal approach to gun ownership. New York, although far more liberal than it used to be, is still way more controlled than Nevada. The reality is, as there is no border control it is easy to simply travel from one state to another with the gun you have purchased and wreak as much havoc as you wish.

So the question is again asked, what is the true advantage of having an armed society versus one where society is subject to gun control?

Well, I am a big believer in gun ownership. That does not mean that I don’t believe there should be controls. In fact, I believe the bar to owning a gun should extend even to an evaluation of your high school record of violence. However, once you give me the permit I believe I should be free to train and practise as I wish without restriction from any authority.

As a pragmatist, I don’t believe that you will ever create a Jamaican regulatory apparatus model in the United States. Even though that is what is required if they need to cut down on the number of mass shootings by mad men.

I would propose that once someone is being treated for any form of mental illness that it is mandatory that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is informed, and all weapons are to be seized. This system should be further utilised if you are on a terrorism watch list.

Domestic violence needs to be included in this report and seizure protocol. This has to be federal. Therefore, gun laws need to be federal and not state-determined. So you can still walk in and buy your assault rifle. However, it would simply be subjective to seizure if you are mentally ill, a suspected terrorist, or beating your wife. Also, this should actually be a check made before you purchase.

If you look at the statistics, most of the time mental illness is a factor in mass shootings. So it is not unreasonable to upgrade the requirement from simply a criminal record check to include a psychological evaluation. The problem is, no one wants to give an inch. There are two sides to the story. The gun owner knows that if he gives an inch, the gun controller will take a mile. This is because their opinions and ambitions are at two separate ends of the continuum. One wants total control and the other no control whatsoever. Neither is being practical. So more people will end up dead unnecessarily.

So, as I asked earlier, how effective is an armed society? People will quote you statistics claiming there is little or no value arming civilians. That is because they don’t understand the value of preventative security.

Let me explain. During my police career I have always worked in highly depressed, largely garrison communities. Sometimes very rarely I ended up working in upper St Andrew. Believe it or not, I feel a lot safer working in the inner city. This may sound ridiculous, but hear me out. There are certain dynamics to conducting a raid on a premises, irrespective of where you work. You have to close the ground to lock down the house. Therefore, you have to breach the border of the premises, to get to the front or back doors to ensure the suspects don’t escape.

If you come under fire whilst doing so there is no cover. Gunmen may fire, or they may not. The licensed firearm holder, if he believes that he is under attack by a gunman, will fire every time. This mistake is very easy to make when men are trying to close the ground without being detected to prevent an escape.

Licensed firearms are very common in St Andrew. Not so much in St Catherine’s depressed communities. A true examination of the Keith Clarke shooting will demonstrate how real this threat is. Three soldiers were shot by Mr Clarke, who I genuinely believe felt he was under attack. It was simply a terrible mistake, but ultimately cost him his life and injury to the military personnel.

So the same fear that I feel of licensed firearm holders accidentally shooting me is the same fear that stops thousands of attacks from happening in St Andrew and other communities that are known to have large numbers of licensed firearm holders.

There is often the question that if we were to arm our inner city residents with licensed firearms, the same way we arm our middle class, that there would be less murders in the inner city. Well, first, there is no actual caveat preventing inner-city applicants from owning licensed firearms. You cannot legally prevent someone on these grounds. It is called ‘discrimination’.

I am not sure how effective it would be in preventing gang murders.

The prevalence of guns in any income group has the potential to increase domestic homicide, so there is that. There are groups, such as illegal taxi operators, that demonstrate verbally abusive and hooliganistic behaviour that resides in inner city communities. I’m not too sure I would want them to be armed with a ‘matic’ and a pro box.

What I will say for certain is that a legally armed inner city would change the culture of police operations significantly. It would obviously become far more dangerous for law enforcement.

Then there is the issue of assault rifles. I totally understand that there will never be a peaceful solution to prevent the sale of assault rifles to citizens in the United States. It is just too much interred in their culture already. Any attempt at seizure is going to cause a civil war. Therefore, not selling any more makes little sense as it will have no effect because of the numbers already out there.

The solution has to be scientifically thought out. The distance between Nevada and New York is way too far to travel without coming upon even one roadblock. In Jamaica, you can barely reach St Ann from Kingston without being stopped by the police.

I once checked on how often I was stopped weekly when I was working at 4:00 am. On average I was stopped six out of 10 times, and I was only travelling from Kingston to St Catherine.

Stop and search is neither a part of their culture nor their law. Well, it needs to be, because if you can travel that far that well-armed then I can just imagine how much narcotics is being trafficked in the same way.

Then there is the ease in which you enter these buildings in New York and the broader United States. I was in Ethiopia a few years ago, and I could not even get into a pharmacy without going through an X-ray machine. Ethiopia does not have liberal gun laws. It does, however, have some political issues that can become very violent.

If you are going to have a country that sells assault rifles like a confectionery does with sweets, then you have to adapt your infrastructure to accommodate it. You modify your security apparatus as is required by your security environment.

There was a time you could virtually walk to the door of an air plane even if you weren’t travelling. That changed as times changed and the security environment required a rethink.

A lot needs to change with gun control but it begins with compromise.

How many people need to die in the United States before both sides of the gun lobby start to cooperate with each other?

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