The crippling gun culture

Aug 26, 2014 Editorial

Every so often we hear of an individual being held with a firearm that is unlicensed. Sometimes we hear of the police, acting on a tip off, finding weapons tucked away somewhere. In many cases we learn that the police would recover firearm after or during a robbery.
Undoubtedly the discoveries are not even the tip of the iceberg. There are more guns out there than one would care to imagine. During the past five years the police have been recovering more than 100 guns per year. This translates to one unlicensed gun every three or four days. And while the police are seizing weapons there are many more gun crimes being committed. Hardly is there a robbery without a gun being used.
Brazil is a large gun manufacturer in our corner of the world so one can expect to see many guns. And indeed the type of guns seized are of Brazilian manufacturer—the Taurus, the Glock. There are also assault rifles in the system, some coming in containers some in crates and barrels and some in vehicles.
A tracking system adopted by Guyana has traced some of these weapons to the United States and Europe.
The fact that they slip through, is because our monitors are not as efficient as we would expect them to be. It is not that some of these smuggled weapons are not uncovered but more often than not, they are missed.
These guns come to Guyana courtesy of the drug trade. Guns are an integral part of the drug underworld because the people who deal in drugs always believe that they have many enemies and need these weapons to protect themselves.
The society in some ways is responsible for the preponderance of guns. For one, people value their privacy and therefore behave in objectionable ways when their routines are interrupted at roadblocks. Roadblocks have been very helpful in unearthing weapons and drugs. On many occasions the police have been able to recover guns after people in vehicles approaching the roadblocks would have attempted to throw the weapons through the windows. Sometimes these guns are found in vehicles.
However, people have been hostile to ranks at roadblocks not recognizing that the simple exercise could save lives. If roadblocks could be so annoying, consider the stop and search method which is commonly used in many societies as the law enforcers act on suspicions.
One can rest assured that if the police were to randomly stop and search certain people, they would find more weapons than they do at present. That is because these people walk around with the unlicensed weapon looking for victims on whom to prey. Some of them walk around with the guns which they then offer for rental to criminal elements.
The problem we have here is that many of those held with guns are very young people who believe that the criminal enterprise is the most lucrative in the world. These are the young uneducated people who are not readily assimilated into the labour force. These are the people most likely to be held with guns. Indeed these are the people who commit the bulk of the armed robberies.
They are the people on whom the police are most likely to find unlicensed weapons. They are threats to the society. These are the people who disrupt parties because they possess a gun; these are the people who see a gun as an extension of their manhood.
We need to dispossess ourselves of this crippling gun culture. In the United States, because the police have the right to search, acting on reasonable suspicion, not many people take the chance to walk around with a loaded firearm. Guyana may wish to adopt this practice. There will be some noise from sections of the society but in the long run, more guns would be taken off the streets and the society would be safer. And this is what we need.

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