It may be the longest of shots pos­si­ble, but can it be that in join­ing Mex­i­co’s US$10 bil­lion law­suit against sev­en US gun man­u­fac­tur­ers, Trinidad and To­ba­go, oth­er Cari­com and Latin Amer­i­ca coun­tries can achieve what the US Con­gress has failed at?

That be­ing to free the Re­pub­li­cans in the Con­gress from the grip of the gun man­u­fac­tur­ers’ lob­by, i.e., to have them leave be­hind the big bucks in cam­paign sup­port they re­ceive in favour of sav­ing Amer­i­can lives and rep­u­ta­tion abroad. For years, the De­moc­rats and sig­nif­i­cant in­di­vid­u­als and or­gan­i­sa­tions have sought un­suc­cess­ful­ly to get the sup­port of con­gres­sion­al Re­pub­li­cans to make the sim­plest of leg­isla­tive changes to pre­vent even 18-year-olds from eas­i­ly pur­chas­ing as­sault ri­fles.

As ex­plained to this news­pa­per by the Deputy Le­gal Ad­vis­er at the Sec­re­tari­at of For­eign Re­la­tions of Mex­i­co, Miguel Reyes, his and oth­er coun­tries are seek­ing com­pen­sa­tion from the gun man­u­fac­tur­ers for the costs in­volved in at­tempt­ing to pre­vent gun vi­o­lence and to com­bat the il­lic­it traf­fic in guns to their coun­tries.

The Mex­i­can law­suit, joined by oth­er na­tions, is an at­tempt to weak­en the gun man­u­fac­tur­ers by hit­ting them in the most sus­cep­ti­ble parts of their or­gan­i­sa­tions, their ac­counts. And to do so from a track mount­ed from the out­side; the in­ter­nal route choked by bil­lions in cam­paign fi­nance dol­lars.

At the core of the Mex­i­can in­spired law­suit, apart from do­ing some dam­age to the “pock­et­books” of the man­u­fac­tur­ers, can be hope to en­gage the fight against oth­er crit­i­cal parts of Amer­i­can so­ci­ety. For in­stance, can a com­bined ex­ter­nal force of coun­tries com­mit­ted to pre­vent­ing the dead­ly weapon­ry from be­ing trans­port­ed to their coun­tries reach the point of dam­ag­ing the US ex­ter­nal trade, po­lit­i­cal and diplo­mat­ic re­la­tions with friend­ly part­ners?

It’s log­i­cal to at­tack from off­shore when the on­shore at­tempts have had lit­tle trac­tion amongst Re­pub­li­cans, whose con­gres­sion­al lead­ers are hooked on the cam­paign dol­lars they re­ceive from the gun man­u­fac­tur­ers.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s state­ment at the Cari­com Crime Sym­po­sium, pledg­ing to move to ban as­sault weapons in­to T&T, got the cyn­i­cal re­ac­tion of it be­ing ir­rel­e­vant, as there is no in­flux of such weapons in­to T&T.

But maybe, as the cur­rent Prime Min­is­ter and sev­er­al be­fore him like to say, when their state­ments and ac­tions make lit­tle sense on the face of them, they have a lit­tle more in­for­ma­tion than the av­er­age cit­i­zen on the back­ground to de­ci­sions tak­en and state­ments made.

We, there­fore, need to place the PM’s state­ment and the buy-in from oth­er Cari­com lead­ers in the con­text that there is more in the prover­bial “mor­tar than the pes­tle.” Ef­fec­tive­ly, there is more than seems ob­vi­ous on the sur­face to or­di­nary Cari­com cit­i­zens of a ra­tio­nale for their lead­ers to join the Mex­i­cans.

It will most cer­tain­ly take much more than a few Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean coun­tries and mul­ti­ple times over US$10 bil­lion to de­feat the mul­ti-tril­lion-dol­lar weapons in­dus­try in the US. The plan of the ini­tia­tors must, there­fore, re­side with a hoped-for suc­cess in this law­suit be­ing fol­lowed by an avalanche of sim­i­lar cas­es with grow­ing con­cerns for the US.