Therefore I will make the heavens tremble and the earth will be shaken out of its place, as the wrath of the Lord of hosts in the day of his fierce anger. And like a hunted gazelle or like a sheep with none to gather them. Everyman will turn to his own people and every man will flee to his own land. – Isaiah 13: 13 and 14.
WHEN IS the gun violence in Barbados going to stop? It looks as though there is no end in sight. It also looks as though the answer is blowing in the wind!
Because when one thinks that it will end soon, there is more gun violence every weekend or every day. And those who are caught and taken before the courts look so relaxed and do not care. They are giving thumbs up – what is next?
They are also using threatening words to court officers while in court – unheard of. It would seem as though Barbados is not alone where the youth violence is concerned for it was reported in the last Sunday Sun that in China, there is an increase of youth violence thatnhas caused many people to question whether more attention should be given to the moral rather than the academic.
I think that in Barbados most parents have failed to discipline their children from the cradle stage and the primary school stage as well. No child should be leaving primary school with a behavioural problem.
The officials at the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation must take some of the blame for some of the problems we are faced with from young people. Because when there is a problem at the schools, parents and children are welcomed at the ministry to complain about the teachers and the principals.
Parents and children should not be given any form of hearing from the officials at the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation.That is what principals are appointed to schools for. They should be sent back to the school and allow the principals to deal with the issue.
I must congratulate Mr Donville Inniss, Minister of International Business, for his outspokenness on the gun violence in Barbados. Hemis reported, in the Monday Daily Nation as saying that poverty is no excuse for lawlessness.
“I grew up in Bayfield, St Philip. There were eight of us, two boys and six girls, a father who was a fisherman and a mother who was an agricultural worker. I know poverty, I have lived through it. None of us were ever picked up by the police for shooting or robbing anybody.”
Mr Minister, you are so right, for those of us who are in a leadership role in Barbados, all of us, went through poverty. Poverty is no excuse for gun violence because the middle class children are also committing crime.
We made it because our parents were firm and they disciplined us and taught us right from wrong. Mr Minister, I like what you said about the mothers, who, when their children went to court described them as nice and decent children.
“In truth and fact they were vagabonds.”
Come on, please, let us all come together and work to bring an end to this gun violence.
