Melis­sa Doughty

Amer­i­can R&B singer Cha­ka Khan made a no­tice­ably short ap­pear­ance yes­ter­day at a sym­po­sium on gun vi­o­lence, where she was sched­uled to give the fea­ture ad­dress. Khan spoke for ap­prox­i­mate­ly five min­utes at City Hall, Knox Street, Port-of-Spain, mak­ing com­par­isons be­tween T&T and the US and en­cour­ag­ing women to "take a stand" against gun vi­o­lence. How­ev­er, af­ter her brief ad­dress she grant­ed mem­bers of the me­dia an in­ter­view, dur­ing which she said she will be or­gan­is­ing a gun hand-in lat­er this year when, in ex­change for weapons, job train­ing and jobs will be trad­ed. She de­scribed this as one small step in ad­dress­ing gun vi­o­lence. "I just feel in my gut that women are go­ing to have to take a ma­jor stand here," she said, at­tempt­ing to shed greater light on what could be done about gun vi­o­lence. Khan be­lieves a gen­er­a­tion has been lost to gun vi­o­lence and that the up­com­ing gen­er­a­tion needs to know they are cared for. Her mes­sage to young peo­ple in T&T in­volved in vi­o­lence was to "Stop it! Stop it now!"

The event was or­gan­ised by Nu Wave En­ter­tain­ment, the pro­mo­tions com­pa­ny re­spon­si­ble for Khan's up­com­ing ap­pear­ance at the Every Woman Moth­er's Day Con­cert to­mor­row at the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah in Port-of-Spain. Khan al­so spoke briefly about a 2004 gun in­ci­dent in­volv­ing her son. The sym­po­sium was chaired by Po­lice Vic­tim and Wit­ness Sup­port Unit man­ag­er Mar­garet Samp­son-Browne and in­clud­ed a pre­sen­ta­tion by Sab­ri­na Mowlah-Baksh, di­rec­tor of the Women's In­sti­tute for Al­ter­na­tive De­vel­op­ment (WINAD). There was al­so tes­ti­mo­ny from peo­ple af­fect­ed by gun vi­o­lence. Mowlah-Baksh re­vealed some star­tling sta­tis­tics, say­ing the Caribbean's mur­der rate has risen con­tin­u­ous­ly since 1995, al­though the rate is de­creas­ing world­wide. She told the au­di­ence the in­crease was due to gun-re­lat­ed homi­cide. Mowlah Baksh said 90 per cent of the Caribbean's il­le­gal weapons start as le­gal weapons, and that il­le­gal guns can be rent­ed in T&T from as lit­tle as $100 an hour. Mowlah-Baksh said the Caribbean's firearm homi­cide rate is sec­ond on­ly to Latin Amer­i­ca's.