Latest update March 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Apr 24, 2016 Features / Columnists, My Column
This past week I happened upon a news item that placed Guyana at number ten among Caribbean countries when it comes to the murder rate. To add insult to injury, all these countries are said to be worse than the United States when it comes to murder.
This is what lends support to the statement by Mark Twain, who said that there are three kinds of lies—Lies, damn lies and statistics. Whenever I tune in to NBC, or CBS or ABC in the mornings, I invariably am greeted with the news of some shooting.
Recently, there seems to be a shooting death every day in the Miami area. In that state there seems to be a gun in every hand. Then there was the mass shooting in Ohio when a gunman killed eight. That same day, in Georgia, a gunman killed six. There was another in Philadelphia this month that claimed three.
There were others these past few months, but Guyana continues to be rated worse than the United States.
Of course the population would determine the murder rate. The United States has a population of some 350 million while Guyana has a population of less than a million. The joke is that Guyana is rated lower than St Kitts and again the size of the population is at stake here. Belize is at the top of the Caribbean list.
But Guyana is my concern, because I live here. In recent times we have been killing each other for no apparent reason. There was the boldface robbery on Alexander Street, Lacytown. A gunman has an interest in the money the victim happens to be carrying so he goes to the victim to take the money. The victim resists and the gunman shoots him dead.
The dust had barely settled before the country records another. A jilted man invites the mother of his son to a desolate spot and slits her throat. This is senseless. Why kill a woman because she tells you that the relationship is over. She has that right in the same way you have the right to terminate a relationship with a woman.
He will have to face his peers in court and explain to them why he planned the killing so cleverly. He tried to convey the impression that he was in Mahdia when the woman died.
I saw this story of two men killing another because this man said something to a female relative. The words might have hurt the feelings of the woman, but that does not put someone in the grave. A son is drinking with his father when something sparks a quarrel. The son does the unthinkable; he takes a cutlass to his father with murderous effect.
Many of the recent murders have occurred during drinking sessions. I drink a bit and I have been in places where men seem to lose control as soon as the alcohol flows to their brain. I can’t imagine men who are friends and who under normal conditions would have disagreements, but who would simply walk away sometimes, smiling at how silly they were. Then this changes when alcohol is added to the equation.
Of course there are the robbery-murders. Gunmen would leave their lair with one thing in mind—take what they see, although they do not know how the people came about the money. Some of them kill without reason. But there are some who kill at the sight of opposition. Some say that the killing is unintentional, because the gunman is extremely nervous.
Yet I wonder at the killing. Someone once said that the most difficult thing to do is to kill another human being. I always say that a person only has one life, so that life should be cherished. It was this belief that caused Desmond Hoyte to reintroduce the gallows for people who invaded homes and took the lives of the homeowners.
Such home invasions ended almost immediately, but the phase left something else. It left homes with heavy grillwork that sometimes causes the death of the occupants, as was the case on East Bank Essequibo when two elderly people died in a fire.
The trend is for the courts to give the killers a lengthy jail term, because executions in the eyes of the sanctimonious are inhumane. But this is not stopping the killings. I can still remember gunmen making their way into mining camps and killing the occupants during robberies.
The Central Islamic Organisation of Guyana (CIOG) in a recent statement said that it “is appalled at the current crime waves that have overtaken our Country, resulting in the loss of life and property of many hardworking and decent citizens of Guyana.
“There is a root cause that results in the behaviour pattern of people to resort to such despicable crimes, and the disregard for fellow human life. This needs to be addressed.”
Guyana must be a lawless place and this is being proven by the number of murders occurring at this time. There were the killings in Albouystown recently. These started with the shooting to death of a soldier and continued with what some say was a vendetta killing.
The year started badly with three in West Berbice. Again these were senseless. Some young cocaine-smoking men go to a home, beat the occupants and set the home on fire, killing a woman. Two days later they enter another home and casually chop the occupants to death. How brutal can we be?
What is good is that the police are catching people faster than at any time in their history. I must now sit and see what happens when these killers go to court.
Listen to the man that is throwing Guyanese bright future away
Mar 19, 2024
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