THE EDITOR: The main argument offered by all the commentators opposing easier access to guns is that the ordinary citizens of TT are all inherently murderous. Mohan Ramcharan and Russell D Latchman both begin from this premise, without offering any evidence for their claim. In fact, they offer no evidence for anything they say from the comfort of their UK homes, where the homicide rate is less than one in 100,000 compared to TT’s 36 per 100,000.

Ramcharan is especially careless with the facts, claiming that most of the gun murders in the United States are committed by white supremacists. In fact, most firearm murders are committed by African-Americans against other African-Americans.

He also claims that countries where citizens have legal access to firearms have higher gun-related deaths. In fact, if Ramcharan had taken the time to look at the countries with the top ten homicide rates (where TT at present occupies fourth place) he would have seen that none of them allows easy legal ownership of firearms.

Latchman’s letter is a masterpiece of self-contradiction, with worries about collateral damage, domestic murders, and bandits invading people’s homes and stealing their licensed firearms – as though all this isn’t already happening.

The fact is, far from increasing anarchy (how much more anarchic can this country get?), ensuring more citizens can legally own guns will give criminals pause.

We can expect, for example, that there will be fewer attempted robberies of people sitting in their cars after one bandit was shot dead recently when he attempted to rob a couple in their car in South Park.

Their resort to falsehoods and illogic shows that these anti-gun ideologues, to use Ramcharan’s own words about Dr Varma Deyalsingh, are “colossally stupid” and they have “spewed words without the benefit of sober thought.”

JENSEN RUSHTON

San Fernando

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