Decent, law-abiding Barbadian citizens work their tails off day and night in order to ensure that there is a meal on the table; that there is roof over their heads; that everybody has decent clothes in the wardrobe to wear to church, to school or to the show; that there is a vehicle, regardless of age or brand, in the garage or parked on the roadside; that they can entertain themselves indoors with a TV, a tablet, video games and other technologies, or outdoors with golf clubs, a cricket bat, soccer balls, road tennis paddles and other sporting products; that, even if it’s just once in a lifetime, they and their spouse and children can take a trip to Disney, a Caribbean cruise, or a shopping trip in New York or Miami; and the list of entitlements goes on and on to the day when all their labours are over and the can be buried in a “decent” casket.
Is it, therefore, right for this vast, decent, law-abiding majority of Barbadian citizens on this very small island, not to be afforded an easy, legal right to own and possess means of protecting and defending themselves, their families and their possessions from and against the indecent, law-breaking criminal majority who now openly, fearlessly and murderously brandish their illegal right to own and possess their means of offence.
It is a fact that Barbados has never been without illegal guns. Back in the day everybody – the good, the bad and the ugly – had a gun. Plantation owners openly walked around with their legal double-barrel shotties on their shoulders and 45s holstered on their waists; law-abiding working class folk had 22s and 32s more for showing off to friends than for protection; and criminal had little need for guns in times when thieves were more interested in fowls in somebody’s yard and sheep in the pen than the few inexpensive personal effects of the then majority working class.
Where did those illegal guns come from? In many cases from the United States in the suitcases of the hundreds of workers, who annually went to Florida and other states to cut sugar cane and pick fruit. In other cases, from a certain inland parish that was best known for making guns at the time.
Then, just as Barbados was approaching Independence and coinciding with the development of middle and upper class residential terraces, gardens, heights and ridges, something started to go wrong, a change that was captured for posterity by the Merrymen in their early 1960s calypso, Too Many Guns.
“Too many guns in the town/Too many guns passing round
“And every day you open the paper/All you read ’bout is murder . . .”
Today’s youngest Junior Monarch calypsonian could have written those lyrics for this year’s Crop Over competition and they would have been as relevant as they were 50 odd years ago when the Merrymen first wrote and sang them.
But the powers of the day and those that followed ignored the message of the Merrymen, as is so often the case with serious social, political and other poignant messages contained in the works of calypso writers and singers. And so it is that today, after 50 something years, we find ourselves in a crisis situation, one which every Barbadian is taking more seriously than they would a hurricane, earthquake or tsunami warning.
Unfortunately, while the illegal gun-related murder and mayhem increases across the country, day by day and night by night, so does the inability of our decent, law-abiding citizens to legally own the right to defend and protect themselves, their families and their property.
What bothers me the most now has to do with the question – how long will it take before this same vast majority of decent, law-abiding citizens decide: “Oh Lord, ah can’t tek it nuh more” and retaliate.
Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm. Email [email protected].