Weak American Laws enabling CARIBBEAN to be WEAPONISED

By Dana Malcolm

Staff Writer

May, 27, 2022 – Weak American gun laws are wreaking havoc on Caribbean islands. No Caribbean country is a major arms exporter or importer or manufacturer, yet Magnetic Media’s special series points out, gun crimes in the Caribbean have had a startling increase in the last three decades and the International Police  (INTERPOL) says 70 percent of all Caribbean murders are carried out with a gun.

The concerning statistics beg the question of where those guns are made and more importantly how they arrive on Caribbean shores.

Most guns in the Caribbean used in crimes start off as perfectly legal weapons.

The world’s largest exporter of guns is the United States of America, which accounted for 37 percent of all guns on the international market between 2016 and 2020; only one percent lower than the other top 4 exporters combined.

The country has been steadily producing more than 8.9 million guns per year since 2008 and 2016 marked the highest year with 11.5 million of the weapons made on US soil according to a report by the Centre for American Progress (CAP).

In addition the process to become a gun manufacturer in the US is fairly smooth.

“There are no substantive requirements to qualify as a gun manufacturer: Applicants must only be over age 21, be eligible to possess guns under federal law, and not have willfully violated any federal laws or regulations related to firearms,” says the CAP.

Gun manufacturing is a growing business, 255% more saturated in 2018 than it was in 2009.

The problem is that those legally made guns have begun to sweep into the Caribbean at alarming rates often from the United States. There is no National Gun registry connecting guns to owners in the US in fact Federal law specifically prohibits it which means after initial purchase, they can simply…disappear.

And like a sinister magic trick many of them appear in the Caribbean and are used to commit crimes before eventually falling into the hands of the police. Five Caribbean countries are listed among the 25 countries with the highest homicide rate in the region. Four of them are listed in the top five Caribbean destinations for illegal importation of US guns.

In 2020 Jamaica, The Bahamas, The Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Haiti requested tracing from the American Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearm and Explosives on a combined 1,136 firearms seized by their various police forces.

Seventy percent or 804 guns were from the United States. Of the 804 a whopping 59 percent or 477 could be traced back to a retail purchaser in the United States.

The ease with which guns are purchased in the United States of America make them a common commodity and facilitates the lucrative illegal gun trade out of the country, the spoils of which trickle into the Caribbean.

CARICOM insists the United States must take the threat to life in the Caribbean seriously saying, “While the Region respects the rights of other states to establish liberal policies regarding access to guns, the negative impacts of these gun policies are not confined to their borders. They have very serious consequences for other countries, including the Caribbean nations, Mexico and the Central American states.”

CARICOM has named Transnational Organised Crime or the Trafficking of Illicit Drugs and Illegal Guns as a tier one crime describing it as an immediate and significant threat to the region.

Without stringent gun laws in the country of origin, stemming the flow of illegal guns is left up to the regional authorities in the Caribbean to shoulder and it is proving too heavy to bear.