Darby Etienne MA Diplomacy
In the Caribbean in the 70s and 80s an argument in the schoolyard was a big story. Sometimes those arguments turned to fights leading to the culprits either being excluded or expelled from school. This leads me to look back fondly on those times and to compare them with today’s violence in schools and neighbourhoods in the Caribbean which makes me very sad; considering no country in the Caribbean produces guns for export, or for local consumption.
Where…I ask are these guns and ammunition coming from?
I suggest to professionals living outside of the Caribbean, on your next trip go and visit a school back home and take some time to speak to kids there about gun violence. I would certainly like to talk to the children given the opportunity. I would explain to the young ones how we lived back then and how we resolved disputes and why most of us are still alive today.
We had our arguments and fights but had I shot all those whom I had problems with in my early days, I would not be here writing this column, speaking to them now on social networks and enjoying life’s technological advances. Life would be entirely different and having made up with many of my old nemeses, I would have missed those golden moments we have shared over the years.
Fortunately, the majority of my college friends followed a disciplined path. I remember a small gang of wannabe gangsters who moved to New York and other parts of America where they graduated to hardcore guns violence. Sadly most of them joined the roll-call of fatalities that characterises American inner cities. The Lucky ones changed their lives or were deported back to the Caribbean. On arrival in the Caribbean some of these men, hardened by their experiences, have facilitated and encouraged the proliferation of the gun culture we see in the streets of the Caribbean.
Photo courtesy woldcnews.com
Caribbean countries have been suffering with gun violence for years now but the leaders are too frightened to say to the (National Rifle Association) NRA and the Americans fix the problem of the guns being shipped from your country “it is destroying our countries”. This American violence culture portrayed in their movies is indoctrinating the youth into equating might with right.
If you can blow someone away that makes you king of the dunghill, and as such you are the law. America claims to be helping the Caribbean with aid programs but they are also taking away many of our brightest minds through a brain drain, and infecting others with the virus of gun culture. Too many young men are immigrating to America to be trained in mindless violence and then deported back to the region, fully educated to the level of PhD in Guns.
Can Caribbean diplomatic professionals make a contribution to ending violence back home?
The problem is growing and it is becoming absolutely necessary that Caribbean Diplomats in America start lobbying the US Congress to put policies in place to stop the flow of guns into the Caribbean. If the present acting Director of the (Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms) ATF, Mr Todd Jones is confirmed after being impeded for 6 years by a strong NRA lobby we may see some change.
In recent times Canada and the United States have been tightening up border controls to prevent illegal migrants from entering by collaborating on the issuance of visas to Caribbean people. The US are currently spending approximately $18 billion on immigration enforcement basically making immigration control a high priority. The US need to be lobbied to ensure that the data is available to Caribbean law enforcement bodies on the criminals who they as forcibly returning to the Caribbean, having graduated in criminal life.
