A fish vendor and her husband were heading home. They had about $4,000 (less than US$20) in unsold fish.
They were going home on their dray cart, not a motor car. They noticed a man on the road flagging them down. The fish vendor believed that the man wanted to buy fish; the husband said he looked suspicious and he decided he was not stopping. Dray carts go very slow.
The man flagging down the dray cart realized that the fish vendor and her husband were not stopping and suddenly let go a volley of shots. The result is the vendor has lost one of her fingers. It could have been worse. She could have lost her life. For what reason did she come close to losing her life?
This is not a rich woman. This is a woman who is working hard for a small income every day. She had $4000 worth of fish in stock and she is being shot and injured by a bandit.
In another incident one man is accused of stabbing to death another man. The man was stabbed more than forty times? What can cause a man to be so brutal to another human being?
You tell me if the police can bring an end to this sort of madness. They cannot because this is not a criminal problem. This is a problem of a society that has become heartless and ruthless and in which they are some insane people not receiving treatment. People are shooting people for any reason; people are killing people willy-nilly. People are paying people to kill other people. What sort of country is this that we are living in?
A blind man wrote a letter in the newspaper in which he revealed that he planted some crops for his upkeep. But someone else reaped it for him. What sort of persons steal from a blind man?
The crime problem in Guyana cannot be solved by the Guyana Police Force. Gun amnesty is not going to work. Such amnesties only work when there is a strong possibility of success. The police right now are reacting to crime. They are not going after the criminals and flushing them out of their holes. The police are not conducting raids to find illegal items and therefore signal to the criminal underworld that they mean business. Unless the police begin to conduct raids in suspected criminal hideouts, unless they begin to rein in weapons from these raids, the bandits are not going to surrender their guns. The only way the gun amnesty is going to be successful is if there is a strong probability that people can be caught with the guns. Only then they will be willing to surrender these illegal weapons.
But surrendering guns is not going to reduce crime. We live in a criminalized society. Do not bother with all that jazz about a criminalized state. The society is more criminalized.
Imagine some female security guards working the night shift to help take care of their families were put to guard a school. A gang of boys were going around raping these guards in Berbice. The guards at one location had to huddle together in a guard hut for protection. Instead of protecting the school, the guards need protection. But that did not save them because the gang of boys still attacked and raped one of them while the others managed to scamper to safety.
What sort of generation is this we are producing? They have no respect for women because they have no respect for their own mothers.
At the heart of this crime wave is an increasingly criminalized society where young people are becoming heartless and ruthless and where parents are no longer able to impart the right values in their children.
The police cannot deal with the crime problem because it is not simply a problem of law and order. It is a problem of a lawless society where people do what they want and get away with it.
