EDITOR, The Tribune.
On the same day last week that it reported the 121st murder of a Bahamian for 2022, The Nassau Guardian casually reported that a man was sentenced to a mere three years in prison by one of our magistrates for driving around New Providence with an assault rifle in his car.
According to the report, this was the man’s second conviction for the same offence and (at only 26 years old) he has other gun offences pending against him. It emerges that he was also driving with his children in the same car with the war instrument – a factor that his attorney deemed mitigating! He will be back on our streets before he is thirty.
Once again, the agonized treatment by our media of the effect (runaway gun violence) could not contrast more vividly with their muted response to the immediate cause (a judiciary that has normalized widespread gun possession by penalizing it so lightly).
Mr. Prime Minister, there is no better time than now to take away from judges and magistrates a discretion they are literally using to undermine the viability of Bahamian society.
We can either pass minimum statutory sentences of no less than 15 years for gun possession, or we can watch our society crumble around us in an endless cycle of easily preventable violence, chanting like nitwits that the causes are “complex”.
ANDREW ALLEN
Nassau,
December 2, 2022.
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