The Firearms Per­mit Unit of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) re­ceived a to­tal of 58 ap­pli­ca­tions in the month lead­ing up to the 2025 Gen­er­al Elec­tion.

How­ev­er, for the pe­ri­od im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter and up to May 26, no ap­pli­ca­tions were sub­mit­ted.

From March 6 to March 31, po­lice of­fi­cials said there were 41 ap­pli­ca­tions while from April 1 to 28, it rose to 58.

Po­lice of­fi­cials wide­ly be­lieve the in­crease was due in part to the elec­tion cam­paign of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress, where its leader, now Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, promised stand-your-ground leg­is­la­tion if vot­ed in­to of­fice.

The Per­sad-Bisses­sar Gov­ern­ment has al­ready said it is mov­ing ahead with its promise and will adopt the Flori­da mod­el.

And while he has since ad­mit­ted to sign­ing a “cou­ple FULs well” since as­sum­ing the post as act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (CoP) on Feb­ru­ary 6, top cop Ju­nior Ben­jamin de­clined to dis­close just how many he had grant­ed.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia, he said this was sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion he did not want in the pub­lic do­main.

He al­so re­fused to re­spond to ques­tions re­gard­ing ap­pli­cants’ pro­files and what trends the TTPS had ob­served.

In­for­ma­tion ob­tained by GML showed that dur­ing the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 2 to Jan­u­ary 31, there were on­ly 44 ap­pli­ca­tions sub­mit­ted to the Firearms Per­mit Unit—which was just three more than those re­ceived in March.

On­ly two FUL ap­pli­ca­tions were re­ceived from Feb­ru­ary 3 to Feb­ru­ary 12—as the Firearms Per­mit Unit un­der­went a re­lo­ca­tion ex­er­cise be­tween Feb­ru­ary 13 to March 5.

Fol­low­ing the change in gov­ern­ment up­on the con­clu­sion of the Gen­er­al Elec­tion on April 28, no ap­pli­ca­tions were re­ceived for the pe­ri­od April 29 to May 26.

An analy­sis of fig­ures ob­tained by Guardian Me­dia showed the num­ber of male ap­pli­cants was more than four times that of fe­males with 135 ap­pli­ca­tions re­ceived from males ver­sus 28 from fe­males.

Not­ing the lack of ap­pli­ca­tions since the end of the elec­tion to present, Ben­jamin said the TTPS was an­tic­i­pat­ing an in­flux in the com­ing months, es­pe­cial­ly in keep­ing with the Gov­ern­ment’s push to en­act stand-your-ground laws.

Re­spond­ing to queries re­gard­ing the cri­te­ria used to grant FULs, Ben­jamin ex­plained some had been grant­ed for, “Court rea­sons.”

Oth­ers he said, would have been grant­ed based on what, “I be­lieved fell with­in the stan­dards and pur­pose and poli­cies we have set out and I would have ap­proved those.”

Ad­di­tion­al FULs grant­ed by the act­ing top cop spanned sev­er­al rea­sons, he said, in­clud­ing, “Threats made to per­sons based on the fact that they have busi­ness­es; and/or they are deal­ing with large sums of mon­ey and so on.”

Ben­jamin as­sured there were no “friends or favours” in­flu­enc­ing the is­suance of FULs, as he had de­nied a few.

In fact, he stressed, “There is a strict cri­te­ria all ap­pli­cants must meet and if they fail to, their ap­pli­ca­tion will be de­nied.”

“Once they sat­is­fy the re­quire­ments, the FUL will be grant­ed, but they must fall with­in the cri­te­ria set out and once they do, I have ab­solute­ly no prob­lem to ap­prove same.”