From The Heart: Guns, Drugs And Murder -
By Rupert Missick:
Nassau, Bahamas -

It is just a few days past Christmas and this little country of ours has already registered six murders for the year. It seems as if guns are everywhere for anyone who wants one.

Drugs seemingly are as prevalent today as they were during the wild seventies and the roaring eighties.

And murder, the by-product of the guns and drugs culture is at its highest levels ever.

While it is wrong to suggest that Haiti is responsible for our troubles in this regard, it is also foolish to ignore the fact that three Haitian boats over the past week alone have been caught with significant amounts of drugs on board.

For Haitians to bring drugs or any other contraband into this country is to add insult to injury.

Many Haitians come here illegally, work and send money to their families back home. Many of them benefit from the educational and medical services of this country.

So to try and bite the very hand that feeds them and to dump their poisonous cargo on this society to create more havoc on our streets and in our homes is totally unacceptable.

The government must move with quick haste to stem this tide of drugs, guns and murder before this country passes completely out of their control and become violent like Haiti and Jamaica.

Our politicians need to wake up, do their jobs or be gone.

The Police, Immigration, Customs and the Defense Force need a quick kick in the pants. And we citizens of this fair commonwealth have got to stop cuddling evil and supporting corruption.

Top government officials cannot take three million dollars from a foreign investor and say, so what. Police and Defense Force Officers cannot be buddy-buddy with known drug dealers and no one sees that as a problem.

Our churches can ill afford to be places of greed and corruption hungering after money, power and prestige without further eroding the spiritual and moral fiber of our society.

In the end, all of us will live in or die in the kind of culture we foster.

Trouble is, we can do better. We can do more and a lot better. It’s high time that we pull up our socks and care to do better.

The United States of America manufactures more guns and weapons of major and minor destruction than any other country in the world.

The largest cash crop in America is not soy, rice, wheat, potatoes, beans or tomatoes. It is marijuana!

You do the math. The largest gun manufacturer, the largest marijuana grower right on our doorsteps; think, can we expect any fall out or as they say in the tourist, any spill over from that?

It is time that The Bahamas demand that America account for any of its drugs or guns that might be finding their way inside our borders.

If we are to account for and is often held responsible for illicit traffic south to north, then American must account for the same from the north to us.

Our problem is of courts that we have no power to enforce anything.

We can propose and suggest as much as we please. The simple fact of the matter is, we manufacture no guns!

26 January 2006