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The prevalence of the gun

Dec 22, 2009 Editorial

The preponderance of guns in the society cannot be overemphasized. Every robbery these days involves a gun. Gone are the days, it seems, of knife point robberies, and barefaced snatch and run robberies. The perpetrators simply whip out guns.
The daring nature of the criminals these days tells another story. Eyewitnesses to these robberies would talk about the age of the criminals. People describe them as very young boys. These have always been the chance takers and the more desperate of the criminals. They are unfamiliar with the risk they take and therefore take greater and greater risks.
Yesterday, on the busy Sheriff Street, which has become the shopping centre in the city three youths, no more than boys executed a robbery on a pharmacy. Eyewitnesses said that this was daring at its best and disrespect for law and order at worst. A police patrol had just passed and others were in the vicinity yet these boys chose to execute their plan.
The fact that they got precious little money is not an issue here. What is at issue is the fact that they knew that the risk of being caught in the act was real.
Indeed, the older criminals are not taking these chances with the result that the city is almost crime-free.
Last month, the Home Affairs Minister, supported by the Crime Chief and the head of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit, all said that the number of illegal guns in Guyana cannot be estimated. They said that these guns came mainly from Brazil with a few coming from Suriname.
Scarcely a day goes by without the police arresting a group of people with guns, all of which are unregistered. For this year there were about 120 such seizures. In basic mathematics, this translates to one gun being seized or discovered every three days in a country with a population of less than a million people.
This situation came about in the wake of the infamous jailbreak of February 2002. Five dangerous criminals broke out of the jail, killing a prison officer and leaving one so seriously injured that she is little more than a vegetable.
Those men armed themselves with guns and a reign of terror began. Guns became the weapon of choice in nearly every crime. Another gun-toting group emerged and suddenly there were guns everywhere. Young boys became a part of the second group and by virtue of their association with men who were major players in the drug industry they soon became objects of attraction and role models.
The men who escaped from the jail and started a new wave of crime are all dead; the group that was closely associated with the drug dealers is all but disbanded but they still have guns which we believe that they rent to young criminals.
We have been critical of the police and scarcely a day goes by without some criticism or the other of the Guyana Police Force. However, the society should recognize that the face of crime seems to be changing daily.
For example, last year the country witnessed the most brutal of crimes. There was, first of all, an attack on the police headquarters with the attackers using high-powered rifles. Then there was the unforgettable massacre of households at Lusignan by gunmen no more than boys who had just entered their teens. There was another slaughter at Bartica. Everything centered on the gun and continues to do so.
And there is an amazing side to all this. Parents who should control the actions of their children almost always contend that their children are innocent and that anything that befalls them is largely due to mistaken identity or an accident.
The truth is that while some may not know of the affairs of their errant children others are complicit. The latter are among the first to cry foul when evil befalls their gun-toting young sons. They are the ones who can do a lot about the presence of the guns in the society but from appearances, they do not.

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