Tightening gun control
It may sound naive and premature to call for tighter gun control in Jakarta, or for that matter the whole of Indonesia. After all, Jakarta is not New York or Los Angeles where armed robbery is the daily staple of metropolitan newspapers and television newscasts; nor have we experienced tragic incidents like the ones in Dunbane, Scotland, in March, or Port Arthur, Australia, last month, in which happy-trigger men shot people, including children and women, at will for no real reason. Recent events in Jakarta, however, justify the need for Indonesia to reassess regulations on possession and use of firearms, or at the very least the way they have been enforced.
Two separate armed robberies in the city last week, coming one day after another, are reminders that Jakarta is indeed becoming very much like New York, and we don't mean it in a nice way. In the May 12 robbery at a Hero supermarket in Kali Malang, East Jakarta, masked gunmen sprayed a wall with bullets from an automatic weapon as they made off with their loot. Nobody was killed but three bystanders were injured. There were no fatalities at the other robbery on May 13 in the parking lot of the Ministry of Transportation, but the gunman fired in the air after slashing his victim's fingers with a sickle and grabbed a bagful of money.
These two incidents, which were widely reported by the media, may sound like clips from the popular cop series NYPD, but they are not isolated cases in Jakarta. In fact, armed robberies occur in our city more frequently than most people think, or would like to think. Many armed robberies do not get reported by newspapers. Police crime statistics, which were printed in this newspaper on Tuesday, show that armed robbery ranks high among the types of crimes committed this year. An average of four armed robberies occur in Jakarta every day, according to the figures released by the Jakarta Police.
Indonesia already has a stern law against illegal possession, production, importation, lending, and use of firearms. Under the 1951 law on firearms, even illegal possession is punishable by death. The law cannot get tighter than that.
If the number of crimes involving firearms has increased, then there must be something wrong with the way the legislation and regulations on firearms are enforced. The most frequently asked question every time an armed robbery occurs is: where did the guns come from? Given the strict law on possession of weapons, we have no gun stores similar to those found in the United States. The authorities have rightly pointed at members of the Armed Forces, both active and retired, as among the possible sources of firearms that have fallen into the wrong hands and used in crimes. The FN and AK-47 automatic rifles that were used in the Hero supermarket robbery, for example, are standard Army weapons, or at least have been in the past. So it was a relief that Jakarta Military Chief Maj. Gen. Sutiyoso this week launched an operation to check on all the guns held by both active and retired servicemen in the city, to ensure that they have not misused the weapons entrusted to them. Retired servicemen, he said, are required to relinquish their weapons.
This military operation has a very limited scope since it only traces one source of firearms that possibly could end up in the hands of criminals. The operation should be expanded to check other possible sources, if there are indeed any others. Smuggling may be one. In addition, trial judges should get into the habit of invoking the 1951 law more frequently when meting out punishment against happy-trigger criminals.
Indonesia should prevent the proliferation of guns among criminals. In the United States, this very proliferation is the very reason why there are many American citizens now rebelling against gun control, because they feel they need to defend themselves against gun-totting criminals. Indonesia should not wait around until people start trying to fight fire with fire.