The Caribbean Is becoming like the Wild West: Thanks to the US Gun In Barrel Scheme

BY MICHAEL THOMAS

While it’s impossible to know how many weapons are successfully smuggled, US investigators admit that the number of guns illegally smuggled into the Caribbean has increased in recent years, and so have violent crimes.

As a Caribbean man, it is not a good feeling to read a report that states that of the 10 countries with the world’s highest homicide rates in 2022, half of them were in the Caribbean.

The gun wars have become so prevalent in the islands now that once relatively quiet islands like the British territory of Turks & Caicos, have seen homicide rates rise by 150% since 2021, according to Insight Crime, a Washington-based research organization that studies organized crime in the Americas.

It is estimated that around 90% of the guns used to commit crimes in the Caribbean are guns bought legally in the U.S., and then smuggled into the Caribbean region.

According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, when the guns found at crime scenes are traced to their source; of the 9,000 Caribbean crime guns that were recovered and traced from 2017 to 2021, only 724 had been legally exported from the US, the rest were smuggled into the islands.

The Caribbean homicide rates in 2022 far exceeded US and global averages. Here is a small sample of the gun crimes by Islands when compared to the U.S

The Bahamas 31.2%, Dominican Republic 12.4%, Puerto Rico 17.6%, Antigua & Barbuda 10.7%, Saint Lucia 36.7%, Barbados 15.3%, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 40.4%, Trinidad and Tobago 39.5%, and Jamaica 53.3% homicide rate per 100,000 population. These figures came from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

As the above figures show, Jamaica now ranks first in the world with an overall homicide rate of about 53 per 100,000, according to the UN. That’s more than eight times that of the US.

Amid all the stats and fancy wording, there is a sad point to be made here. Caribbean leaders say that they have pulled millions from their already small budget to help the U.S. fight their war on drugs and are now looking forward to the U.S. doing the same with the island’s gun problem.

“As we have assisted them in the war on drugs, they must assist us in the war on guns,” Andrew Holness, the Jamaican Prime Minister said.

If the U.S. does not reciprocate, the Caribbean could and might become like Mexico where law enforcement officials estimate that organized criminals who are heavily armed with US-made weapons control a sizable portion of that country’s territory.

Is America complicit in all this? Oh yes. It is well documented how U.S. weapons that are legally exported to other countries and end up in the wrong hands have caused devastation on a massive scale to those importing countries.

Does America care? I digress. Behar, a former ATF agent, recalled a former supervisor’s reaction when he suggested they needed more support for international investigations. He said, “Look, the gun left the US — what the hell do I care about it? It’s not my problem.”

Some officials from the US and Caribbean say the system effectively protects gun dealers and makers from accountability while leading many smuggling investigations to dead ends.

Caribbean leaders who mistakenly keep looking to the U.S. for help with their gun problems at home, need to take a second look at the U.S. and their policies.

According to Graham Husbands, a firearms examiner in Barbados for nearly three decades, “Even by the ATF’s accounting, it’s failing to meet its goal of inspecting each of the country’s 78,000-gun dealers and makers once every three years. The agency reported in 2022 that it would need more than double its inspector ranks to reach that target.”

There is no quick and easy way to solve the gun problem as even the U.S. are now finding out. ATF inspectors showed up to inspect a gun shop in Atlanta but were met by a congressional delegation.

In America’s case, the delegation was only protecting their Second Amendment rights. It is said that these rights were put in place to make sure the public had protection just in case the government decided to turn rogue. Has America’s government gone rogue? That is a subject for another article.

One thing is clear, as Philip Davis, the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, put it last year at a law-enforcement conference, “The right to bear arms in the United States does not mean that there is also a right to traffic those arms to Caribbean countries.”

On the subject of gun crimes in the islands and looking to the U.S. for help. The Island politicians must surely realize by now that “You just do not ask a pussycat if he or she ate the slice of cheese.”