Akash Sama­roo

Da­ta and an­a­lyt­ics ex­perts are warn­ing that Trinidad and To­ba­go should be wary of con­ver­sion de­vices that are be­ing used by crim­i­nals to turn sim­ple pis­tols and hand­guns in­to as­sault weapons.

This is one of the find­ings in the Caribbean Firearms Study, which is be­ing hailed as the first com­pre­hen­sive, ev­i­dence-based study on il­lic­it firearms in the Caribbean re­gion. It found that the rate of lethal vi­o­lence in the Caribbean for 2020 was al­most three times the glob­al rate, with firearms used in more than half of the Caribbean’s homi­cides.

The re­port, which will be re­leased this morn­ing, was done over two years by Cari­com IM­PACS and the Small Arms Sur­vey (SAS).

Speak­ing ex­clu­sive­ly with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day be­fore the em­bar­go on the re­port was lift­ed, SAS’ head of Da­ta and An­a­lyt­ics, Nico­las Florquin, re­vealed a de­vel­op­ing con­cern in T&T.

“We are see­ing a range of new types of firearms mak­ing it in­to the il­lic­it mar­ket, es­pe­cial­ly so-called ghost guns that are ba­si­cal­ly un­fin­ished parts of guns which can then be used to pro­duce a re­al gun but those are hard­er to de­tect and can be smug­gled in parts and com­po­nents,” Florquin ex­plained.

Florquin added that a con­ver­sion de­vice is one of the more pop­u­lar parts.

“Those are lit­tle de­vices that are put in­to a se­mi-au­to­mat­ic ri­fle and pis­tol and turn them in­to ful­ly au­to­mat­ic weapons and Trinidad and To­ba­go has seized quite a few of them over the past two to three years,” he said.

Florquin de­scribed those de­vices as a grow­ing prob­lem among the crim­i­nal el­e­ment in the re­gion.

Cari­com IM­PACS ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor, Lieu­tenant Colonel Michael Jones, said they’re quite easy to make even at le­git­i­mate busi­ness­es.

“Talk­ing about Glock switch­es in par­tic­u­lar, some of them can be made with 3D print­ers, so it’s not any­thing sig­nif­i­cant re­al­ly but they’re easy and af­ford­able. So, the same pri­vate­ly man­u­fac­tured firearms, you can use 3D print­ers to de­vel­op them (con­ver­sion de­vices). They tend not to be so ro­bust, but they are us­able.”

The re­port al­so looked at le­gal ver­sus il­le­gal gun own­er­ship in the re­gion.

It stat­ed, “The re­gion­al rate of le­gal civil­ian firearms is low at 1.65 reg­is­tered firearms per 100 res­i­dents. The avail­able da­ta sug­gests that il­lic­it hold­ings great­ly out­num­ber le­gal firearms in sev­er­al coun­tries.”

How­ev­er, SAS da­ta ex­pert Anne-Sev­er­ine Fab­re said putting more guns in­to peo­ple’s hands, even for pro­tec­tion, may not be the so­lu­tion.

“We’ve done some in­mate in­ter­views and some hap­pened in Trinidad and To­ba­go, and a lot of those in­mates were serv­ing sen­tences for firearms re­lat­ed crimes and we’ve seen that many of them men­tioned the fact that they used firearms be­cause it was for self-pro­tec­tion. They men­tioned that’s just the way it is in their com­mu­ni­ty and a very in­ter­est­ing ex­am­ple was one of the in­mates men­tioned that you can­not punch a bul­let, so you can see the trig­ger­ing ef­fects, there’s a fine line be­tween ac­quir­ing more guns for pro­tec­tion and hav­ing it mis­used.”

SAS said the two-year sur­vey showed that traf­fick­ing is the main rea­son guns are com­ing in­to the re­gion and this is most­ly through mar­itime means.

Florquin said the US is a ma­jor source of il­lic­it firearms for the Caribbean, but added it was not a sim­ple ex­pla­na­tion.

“There’s dif­fer­ent ways that US weapons make it to Caribbean coun­tries. There is traf­fick­ing from the US to the Caribbean but there are in­di­rect ways. For ex­am­ple, 22 per cent of the firearms traced to the US from the re­gion were at first legal­ly ex­port­ed to a third coun­try be­fore be­ing traf­ficked in­to the Caribbean.”

Guardian Me­dia asked for the name of that coun­try.

“One of the short­ages of the da­ta is that it’s not cur­rent­ly pos­si­ble to find out who those coun­tries are,” he said.

The Caribbean Firearms Re­port will be launched to­day at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the Caribbean Firearms Study 2023.

Florquin said the re­port sym­bol­is­es an all-of-so­ci­ety ap­proach to tack­ling crime and firearms-re­lat­ed vi­o­lence and pro­vides ev­i­dence for the pub­lic health ap­proach to crime which was es­poused at the re­cent Cari­com Crime Sym­po­sium.

Lieu­tenant Colonel Michael Jones said the tim­ing of the re­port and the re­cent Cari­com sym­po­sium on crime was for­tu­nate.

“Hav­ing now iden­ti­fied that you want to take the pub­lic health ap­proach, it means that the met­rics to be mon­i­tored in man­ag­ing the pa­tient does not re­side on­ly with the po­lice, be­cause where­as where we fo­cus sin­gu­lar­ly on shoot­ings, vi­o­lence can be quite ex­pan­sive. To run the anal­o­gy of pub­lic health, yes we are in a pan­dem­ic, this gives us a good ethno­graph­ic re­search as we are no longer lumped with Latin Amer­i­ca and then we have to come back with a plan so we can bring the fever we are hav­ing at the mo­ment in the Caribbean down.”