Homicide numbers suggest new law is working
Published:Thursday | January 23, 2025 | 12:09 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
In the two-year period since the Firearms Act was strengthened, our homicide rate has dropped by nearly 25 per cent. Since Independence, there are only two other two-year periods where our homicide rate dropped by more than that. The first was the two-year period after the 1980 election. The second was after the Tivoli incursion. Both of those were extraordinary events.
It is too early to know as yet, but that badly needed 2022 Firearms Act update may also turn out to be an extraordinary event in our history if it portends a dramatic and permanent drop in homicides.
Parliament is supposed to act in the interest of the majority. I am willing to bet that our majority would love to see our homicide rate drop as dramatically as it has in El Salvador. We have another 95 per cent decline to go from 2024 to catch them.
In the same way that war inevitably results in collateral damage, in El Salvador it is alleged that some of the people detained are not gang members. So, if preventing our judges from ordering suspiciously weak sentences or punishing licensed firearm holders for reckless behaviour results in minuscule, bloodless collateral damage, it will still have moved us forward as a nation. Crazy law or not, the homicide numbers strongly suggest that the new law is working.
Your article’s mention of separation of powers suggests that you are caught up in a kind of insulated judiciary bubble. To be a true democracy, both the legislative and the judiciary branches must be subservient to the will of the majority. If we are to move past being the poor laughing stock member of CARICOM, both branches will need to serve the majority and not subjugate us by defending (and therefore promoting) crime and corruption, as they have since 1962.
After reading your article, I concluded that one of us is out of touch. If the 2022 Firearms Act is maintained, it is you. If it is weakened and loopholes are punched into it with no outcry from the general public, it is me. If our homicide rate does not continue to drop, I will migrate. I wonder what you will do if it drops, Mr Samuels.
SEYMOUR GREYS