I used to love Algebra. The combination of numbers and letters made it more attractive and challenging than Arithmetic. It was fun trying to figure out relationships between numbers that appear to vary.
Long before I was introduced to Algebra, I was attracted to guns. Fed by a steady diet of Spaghetti Westerns and war movies, my boyhood friends in Grass Street, and I spent our free time concocting ways to playfully kill each other, as imaginary cowboys, Indians, Yankees, and Nazis. Until we were gifted “ammos guns,” usually by our fathers at Christmas time, we used our index fingers or pieces of wood or metal to “shoot” each other. “I kill you! I kill you!” Often, we would refuse to accept being shot or killed, even after being hit at point-blank range. But the saving grace of our gunfights was that we all lived to fight another day.
I do not recall when the lethality of guns hit me hard enough to cause me to shun guns. Now, I find myself weighing the pros and cons of owning a gun, even for personal protection.
This past week, Algebra and guns occupied my mind, after Colt Gray, a 14-year-old, 9th Grader at Apalachee High School, near Atlanta in the USA, left an Algebra lesson only to return with an AR-style rifle, with which he killed two students and two teachers and injured nine others. Shockingly, Colt’s father, Colin Gray gave him the rifle as a Christmas gift in December 2023, seven months AFTER the FBI interviewed them following threats of a school shooting, that appeared on a social media platform called “Discord.” In the interview, the father admitted to keeping hunting guns in the house but insisted they were not loaded and that his son did not have unsupervised access to them. Then, he undermined these assurances by giving his son his own weapon, totally uncaring that he could use it without supervision.
Georgia law allows a minor from age 13 to be charged as an adult in certain crimes. Consequently, Colt will be tried as an adult for murder and attempted murder. He faces a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. Fittingly, Colin Gray was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree murder and cruelty to children, and faces a 180-year prison sentence. This follows another incident in April 2024, whereupon the parents of another Michigan teenager who killed four students with a gun they bought for him, were also sentenced for their roles in the attack.
The irony here is inescapable. Georgia’s tough sentencing laws are not matched by its gun ownership laws. In 2023, Georgia became the 25th US State to remove restrictions on gun ownership. In June 2021, Texans, like Georgians, were allowed to carry handguns WITHOUT A LICENSE OR TRAINING. Imagine that!!!
There is no Algebraic equation that can rearrange the startling figures of gun-related, homicides in the USA to make them palatable. Data shows that more than 50 people are killed each day by firearms in the USA. So far, in 2024, there have been 385 “mass murder events” (MSEs) in homes and public places in the USA, in which four or more people have been killed or injured. In each of the last four years, more than 600 mass shootings have occurred, averaging nearly two shootings a day. In 2021, there were nearly 700 such incidents with 48,830 victims.
But wait! There’s more!
It’s estimated that in 2018, there were 390 million guns in circulation in the USA. A whopping 7.5 million Americans became new gun owners between January 2019 and April 2021, thus exposing 11 million people to firearms in their homes, including 5 million children. About half of these new gun owners were women, while 40% were either black or Hispanic. Consider that all of this is happening in a country where a fetus’s “right to live” sits comfortably alongside the “right to be killed,” conferred by the sacred “right to keep and bear arms.” Amazingly, after MSEs, gun sales, gunmakers’ profits and shares routinely rise. After the Sandy Hook and San Bernadino shootings in 2012 and 2015, gun sales jumped by 3 million and 1.6 million respectively.
Given all this, the osmotic transfer of guns from the USA to the Caribbean is unstoppable. The ability of Americans to buy guns without licenses means these weapons can move anywhere, anyhow, in barrels, luggage and containers, via sea or air. The gun lobby in the USA, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA) has successfully defeated all attempts by the Federal government to track gun sales and/or to establish a national handgun registry. Consequently, the US Government has no idea how many guns fall out of circulation. Although it is a legal requirement, some gun manufacturers do not report their annual production figures to the Government.
And so it is that these lethal weapons enter the Caribbean. The rest is painful history. Whenever the USA perceives that the homicide rate in a Caribbean country, threatens the safety and security of its citizens, it does not flinch from imposing travel advisories on that country, which ultimately affects the livelihoods of millions who depend on tourism, and complicates the efforts of Caribbean governments to provide jobs for those who use the very guns leaving the USA to commit violent crimes.
Colt Gray’s travails hold potent lessons for us in the Caribbean. It has emerged that his parents are in the throes of a bitter divorce and that his mother is serving a 46-day prison sentence after being caught with banned drugs in her car. Instructively, while authorities at Cole’s former school were alerted about his psycho-social challenges and advised to monitor his behaviour, that information was not passed to other schools in the area, including his new school. These revelations point to the importance of Caribbean countries having an early warning/surveillance system that tracks the movement of at-risk, young people within the school system and communities.