Dear Mr Commissioner:
Since Wednesday gone I have been waiting to hear you declare that the reporter who wrote a story that appeared in that day’s Midweek Nation and headlined Dottin: Bajans In Love With Guns, had misinterpreted what you had said.
I have been waiting because I just could not and still cannot believe that you would have stated that because several applications were being made for firearms, sometimes you believed that Barbadians had a love affair with firearms and that “it is a hot item”.
Mr Commissioner, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt regarding how that statement was reported. I truly believe that some words were overlooked and omitted by the reporter, thereby presenting a misrepresentation of what you actually said and, therefore, what you meant to convey to the public at large.
I say so because my simple mind discerns little or no difference between Barbadians having a love affair with firearms and a statement that Barbadians have a love affair with chicken or with cricket, with older secondary schools, with shopping in Miami, with wearing the latest brand name clothing, with Jamaican reggae artistes, with drinking liquor, with having sex, with “cussing stink” or with any and everything else imaginable and with which Bajans do appear to have a love affair.
But without the benefit of access to the “calibre” of the many persons who are now applying for permission to own and bear firearms, and I get the impression that the number is unprecedented in modern history, I am also willing to bet that most if not all of those persons are law-abiding citizens.
In other words, it’s not the gang members who frequently shoot up each other’s blocks to avenge a member who might have been the victim of a drive-by or walk-by shooting; not the thieves who break and enter honest people’s homes with illegal guns in hand to commit manslaughter, that used to be murder once upon a time, if confronted by the homeowners; not the drug runners who engage in often deadly Bonnie and Clyde-type shootouts with police and soldiers on secluded beaches in an effort to preserve their right to land and push their illegal substances; not the rent-a-gun entrepreneurs who offer this service to anyone who needs it.
I would wish to bet that if a survey was commissioned to determine who are all these several Barbadians currently making applications for firearms, it would be realized that rather than being persons who have a love affair with firearms they are, in fact, persons who dislike or even hate guns.
They hate the firearms of all calibres, from BB guns to reportedly grenade launchers, that seem to proliferate like sea sand across the length and breadth of Barbados and on which no amnesty in recent years has had any impact.
They hate these guns being pushed into their faces, necks and backs or those of loved ones as they are being robbed of personal possessions, goods and their jewellery; or being physically or sexually assaulted. They hate the myriad other illegal uses to which illegal guns are put in the hands of the criminal elements.
Moreover, they hate having firearms of their own because such possession is driven mostly by overriding fear of being victims of criminal activity.
• Al Gilkes is head of a public relations firm. Email algilkes@gmail.com