Prime Minister Mia Mottley wants youth clubs and service organisations to teach young people to respect the use and power of firearms.
As she closed the annual Tradewinds multinational military exercise at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre on Thursday, she said that in the face of rising gun crime within the region, additional steps must be taken by service organisations to bring on more young people and teach them not only the importance of national service but how to handle guns with respect.
Mottley said: “The question is, how do we ensure that the majority of people within our countries use it for good, such that our efforts can always be gazed outwards and not necessarily inwards? This is important especially in the Caribbean at this juncture, given the harsh reality of the high per capita rate of homicides in our region. Young men and women, in my view, ought to be exposed in the context of the cadets, services clubs [and] scouts because they must know how to handle tools with respect.
“Even though a lot of people have electric stoves, you still have to learn to use matches for various occasions when you have to light a gas stove. We teach them how to light a match responsibly because we don’t want them to get burned.”
The prime minister added that there ought to be a significant expansion of the number of opportunities for young people to understand the importance of service, “but equally to understand the importance of how to handle weapons, whatever they are”.
“To this end, the Barbados Defence Force has been supportive in continuing to expand its cadet programme and sea cadet programme, and as physical circumstances allow us, I actually would like for us to be able to ensure that every boy and every girl, as they become teenagers in this country, they are exposed to a service organisation.”
Mottley stressed that it was not only officers within the various service branches but also many citizens who ought to be ready for the call of duty whenever an emergency or disaster strikes, and she urged young Barbadians to be trained to be ready to serve in a crisis.
“A time will come when it will not only be the men and women in uniform who would be required to be called into service, but it would actually be the people of the nation who must stand up to the call, more likely than not, especially in circumstances of small island states whose capacity to survive, can be obliterated within a few hours in the context of a hurricane,” she said.
PM Mottley praised the Exercise Tradewinds team’s staging of an open day during the past weekend at BDF’s Paragon, Christ Church base for the public to see how the armed forces ready themselves for any eventuality.
She said the exercise had “elevated the extent to which ordinary people now understood that guns could be used in circumstances to commit crime or to protect the region’s borders from criminal activities”.
However, the task at hand now, she stressed, was for regional governments to ensure that its citizens see the benefit of using firearms for protection and not destruction.
“A gun is a tool that kills. It doesn’t walk and even with AI, it doesn’t yet talk. Therefore, it comes back to the basic integrity of the individuals in our society to determine how to treat weapons with respect.
“I want to commend the exercise because I saw on the weekend, you opened up to people of this nation and I saw families come and bring their children. We will not be able to obliterate guns from the earth because regrettably it is here. But like with everything else we do with our children, it is to teach them to respect how they use weapons,” Mottley stressed.
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