For­mer po­lice com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith says that as com­mis­sion­er he gave out ap­prox­i­mate­ly 6,000-odd FULs out of the 25,000-plus ap­pli­ca­tions made over the last 10 to 20 years, which he claimed were be­ing “ig­nored” by pre­vi­ous com­mis­sion­ers.

“Half of these (6,000) were giv­en to cit­i­zens while the oth­er half were giv­en to past and present mem­bers of the pro­tec­tive ser­vices,” Grif­fith said in a video mes­sage on Wednes­day.

“This means that I gave out just about .3 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion... got firearms from my­self which negates any pop­u­lar lie of (Dr Kei­th) Row­ley’s PNM that Firearms Users Li­cence (FULS) were be­ing giv­en out to every­one,” he said.

Grif­fith is­sued the re­sponse af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley re­vealed in Par­lia­ment the find­ings of a TTPS au­dit done from 2016 to 2021. This re­vealed se­ri­ous find­ings con­cern­ing FUL is­suances, process­es and pro­ce­dures as well as per­mits for am­mu­ni­tion to be im­port­ed and re­lat­ed is­sues, par­tic­u­lar­ly over the 2018 to 2021 pe­ri­od. Griffth served as com­mis­sion­er then.

Grif­fith said, “This word ‘al­le­ga­tion’ is a word used by Row­ley’s PNM that re­al­ly means lies with no ev­i­dence. Kei­th Row­ley again de­cides to use Par­lia­ment to fool the coun­try based on his ob­ses­sion with le­gal firearms.”

He claimed Par­lia­ment is the one place a per­son can “lie and not be sued”.

Grif­fith said the court in­junct­ed Row­ley, pre­vent­ing the re­lease of the re­port on FULs done by the team of po­lice­men (the Ray­mond Craig Re­port) since those who did the re­port nev­er con­tact­ed him and nat­ur­al jus­tice didn’t oc­cur.

“You can’t hire peo­ple, pay them big mon­ey, let them write a re­port to smear some­one’s char­ac­ter and not al­low the per­son to de­fend them­selves against the lies put in the ini­tial re­port,” he claimed.

Grif­fith said if the Prime Min­is­ter read that (Craig) re­port in Par­lia­ment af­ter the court said not to, it showed con­tempt as a Prime Min­is­ter.

Grif­fith called for an­swers on the au­dit re­port which the Prime Min­is­ter re­vealed in Par­lia­ment on Wednes­day, “If this was the re­port which the court blocked, have you now breached that high court or­der?

“If it was from any oth­er re­port, it should in­deed be made pub­lic so that those ac­cused can take ac­tion if re­quired.”

He ques­tioned if the au­dit re­port is a new one, why those who al­leged­ly com­mit­ted in­fringe­ments have not been ar­rest­ed.