While we have not experienced a mass shooting anywhere in the order of what takes place in North America, Jamaicans will readily empathise with the relatives of the nine people killed Tuesday in British Columbia, Canada.

At Jamaica Observer press time, wire service reports said a shooter gunned down nine people and injured 25 others at a school and a residence in the remote town, in what was said to be the third-deadliest shooting in the country’s history.

Police said the shooter had not been yet identified but was the same person described as a “female in a dress with brown hair”, also a rarity as — certainly in the US — 95.4 per cent of perpetrators of mass shootings are men.

Mass killings are said to be rare in Canada, but authorities said the attack in Tumbler Ridge, with its population of 2,400, was the second deadly incident in British Columbia in less than a year, after a man drove a car into a crowd last April.

Canada’s worst mass shooting took place in 2020 when a man disguised as an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police killed 23 people. In comparison, Jamaica had two of its worst mass shootings — leaving six people dead in Linstead, St Catherine, and five at a friendly football game in Rockfort, east Kingston in 2024.

The federal Government in Canada, in response to national outcry, took several initiatives to update gun laws. Those measures include a ban on 1,500 types of assault-style weapons, involving the freezing of handgun sales and expansion of the list of banned firearms.

As has become the norm in Canada and the US, efforts to curtail gun sales have met pushback by the gun lobby, proving to be politically divisive. This was particularly the case with a national gun buyback programme in Canada for military-style assault rifles.

There are roughly 1.3 million registered firearms in Canada, according to police data. In the US, there are 327 death by gun violence daily, with one per cent of those deaths coming in mass shootings, according to official statistics.

Mass shooting is defined as an incident of targeted violence carried out by one or more shooters at one or more public or populated locations, claiming multiple victims chosen either at random or for their symbolic value.

But Jamaica’s latest mass shootings have been linked to gang violence. Still, the outcome is usually the same — innocent people being maimed or killed, frequently robbing homes of their breadwinners and leaving families to grieve the loss of loved ones.

Jamaica can therefore celebrate what is a historic drop in homicides this year so far, following a record-breaking 2025 — below 700 for the first time in three decades.

As of February 7, 2026 murders have declined to 51 from 85, or a 40 per cent reduction over the corresponding period last year.

Even then, it would be foolhardy to play ease-up on the gunmen or to regard the 18 murders recorded in the first week of February this year as acceptable. The saying that one murder is one too many is by no means mere cliché.

The police continue to need all the support they can get, both from the Government and from the Jamaican people who have been admirable in helping the security forces to take the fight to the killers.

In the meantime, we grieve with Canada and hope that the current tragedy will strengthen their resolve to pursue common-sense gun control.