Is Jamaica copying mass shootings from the US?

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The brazen shooting of nine people at a football game in Spring Village, St Catherine, recently should not be glossed over as just another crime production notch in the nation’s annual linear crime growth. Those bullets were not only attacking the people enjoying a game of football, but the nation state was under attack.

Those gunmen were functioning inside their own bubble of absolute freedom of mind and will – ignoring all regulations, laws and devaluing the rights of citizenship. During the 1990s, the east African nation of Somali functioned that way and was considered a failed state. If Jamaica’s intellectuals were wondering when crime production would explode into carefree, lawless mass-shooting zones, look no farther [because] that Rubicon has been crossed.

Like the United States, [which has] a gun-friendly second amendment constitution, Jamaican leaders must now define how many victims in a single incident is considered a mass shooting. Our gun-worshipping country to the north set the mass-shooting threshold at three people shot in any single incident, which, as I am writing this article, according to the Washington Post, the mass-shooting tally is 300 as of June 2, 2022.

Obviously, mass shootings in the USA will far outpace the number of days in the year. Both the Government of Jamaica and its citizens already know that social sneezing in the United States gives Jamaica a bad cold and hot fever. Is the brazen, wholesale mass shootings for so long contained to the USA finally the next destructive virus to take root in the Jamaican culture?

JEFF WRIGHT