Good evening, everyone. Yesterday morning I woke up and decided to do something that I don’t normally do. I wrote down my thoughts that I wanted to share with you today.

In this conversation, I do not want in any way for any word to be misplaced or indeed for anything to be omitted. I have already spoken to you about the role that law enforcement in this country must play in curbing the surge of violence, about the additional resources and approaches taken by the Police Service and about the legislative changes that we must bring to increase the efficiency of our court systems and indeed to modernise our criminal justice system which is caught in a 19th/20th century position.

We will continue to speak to you on these issues as we must.

But today my friends, this is a conversation with Bajans and all who live here and who love our country as if it were their own. This country of ours is great because when it has mattered most, we have always come together to confront and rise above challenges. We have done so throughout our history and certainly in my time as leader.

We’ve saved our way of life by saving our dollar and we’ve saved lives and livelihoods as we fought to overcome the personal and societal dread of COVID-19. We have grown stronger to fight this new reality of ours, this climate crisis, and we will continue to work together to become even more resilient because we’re not where we need to be to fight that battle.

But my friends, we must now come together again to confront the tendency towards violence in this country, a violence driven by anger very often and the inability or unwillingness to resolve conflicts peacefully.

We face the scourge of greed and gangs fighting for dominance and territory and we’re seeing a rising incidence equally of mental and physical abuse. The mental health challenges have been compounded especially since COVID brought the restrictions on movement and individual choices. You remember indeed from the same room I addressed you many times.

These matters are made worse by other issues that we must consciously control as leaders wherever we are; whether as parents or guardians and godparents or indeed extended family or neighbours, friends, employers, members of the community, sporting or cultural groups in which we interact. And we must do so whether in our homes, our place of work, our businesses, and indeed we must do so where we worship, in our churches, our mosques, our temples, wherever we go for religious or spiritual worship. We must immediately address the absence of religious and moral grounding of our children.

We have talked about it for too long without serious progress. We must teach them and they must learn the basic difference between right and wrong and the need to respect human life, their own lives, and indeed that of others. We need to control the inappropriate use of social media to circulate memes that hurl insults or share videos that denigrate groups like young women, young girls, or promote the attraction of guns or indeed the sending of direct messages to issue threats and to deliberately generate fake news, news that we know to be fake.

We must monitor and balance the excessive screen time and exposure to violent content. This nation’s children are being desensitised to violence through the non-stop playing of video games and the overuse and misuse of social media through the cartoons that they’re watching in some instances. It is interesting that it is called social media as it quite often leads to anti-social behaviour and this is now being recognised the world over.

This overexposure desensitises not only the children but indeed some of the parents to the presence of guns and killing. Our children, my friends, are spending hours on these devices, pausing only to eat and to drink and returning to the games where they have been killed multiple times for the day already.

And they’re still playing and after a while what happens? Killing means nothing to them. Everything on social media is a trend and unfortunately we have seen gun violence trend not only here but globally reminding us of the fragile nature of our peace.

Zero tolerance for guns and drug abuse must not only be engaged and articulated by law enforcement, but across our society; in our institutions, in our homes and indeed yes on our blocks. You know, Judge Judy has a saying that if a song’s too good to be true, it is normally not true.

If the bulging pocket in your son or your grandson’s or granddaughter’s or your best friend’s pocket looks like a gun, is shaped like a gun, it bulges like a gun, my friends it is most likely a gun.

By closing our eyes and remaining silent we are indirectly authorising its indiscriminate and unlawful use. This is a stage at which as parents, as guardians, as godparents, as teachers, as brethren and sistren on a block, we need to say to each other this is not the right way to go. It will not, this will not have any happy ending. Get rid of it.

And if you don’t trust them to get rid of the guns then ask them to hand it to you and you give it to your pastor if you don’t want to surrender it to the police. We must find a way to reduce the number of guns in this society even as the police do their job and the customs and others do their job to restrict their entry into Barbados. (PR/GIS)