#SpeakingOut – Gun laws in Barbados

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

I am troubled with legislation that says that a person who handles a gun but kills no one is to be sentenced to the same punishment as someone who actually pulls the trigger and kills. Is this the kind of legislation that flows from our Parliament today? Since 2018 the Government has been struggling to find solutions to the escalating gun violence in our society. Minister after Minister have blamed the former Government, parents, teachers, the churches …. everyone else but themselves. 

We have seen at least four different Ministers over the past 55 months assigned to deal with the issue and each one has been a successful failure. We have gone from an average of 24 gun-related murders per year to 47. And this has nothing to do with those who have been maimed or disfigured by gun violence resulting in long and costly rehabilitation along with the financial and mental anguish of families.

Perhaps because the alleged perpetrators are black men from the working class, our politicians focus heavily on inflicting the most severe penalties on them. Let me be brutally frank here …. if gun violence was more prevalent among the upper echelons of our society our Parliament would be talking about policies and programmes aimed at stemming deviant behaviour, early interventions for such youth, funding for de-escalating programmes, drug rehab and education programmes and such like. But like our former slave masters these young negroes need to know their place! They need to be imprisoned. 

I submit to you that if tomorrow the spouse (regardless of gender) of a Minister was caught with 2 bullets in her/his handbag we would hear about extenuating circumstances that negate her/his prosecution. If the offspring of a “big-up” is caught with an unlicensed firearm in his car which one of his friends “accidentally” dropped in the vehicle, said offspring would benefit from high-priced defence lawyers, a paid PR campaign and be set free. How many of these boys on the block are bringing these guns into Barbados?

Is it too much for us to demand sound, enlightened and visionary debates on public issues in our Parliament? One Party having all 30 seats ought not to be an excuse for the intellectual laziness that permeates today. Politicians need to research, consult with constituents, think deeply and speak with a clear mind. Above all they need to consider the consequences of their words and their decisions. You cannot pander to a noisy minority. It looks as though the decisions of our Parliament today is guided by the noise of the rabble rousers on Brasstacks or the influencers on Facebook, Tik-Tok or Instagram and not based on rational thinking. 

I do not have all of the answers to the spate of gun violence in our society today because I, like our politicians, do not seem to know the underlying reasons. But I do know that mass incarceration of our poor black young men is not the solution. That has been tried in many other countries and it has failed. 

I have seen people who have died from gunshot wounds. I have felt the pain of mothers who have had to bury their young sons. It is real. It is awful. The pain never goes away. But the slew of punitive laws imposed by this Government will not solve this problem. That is as real as the body in the coffin. 

D. Goddard