corruption

Firearm Policy, Crime, and the Unspoken Realities in Trinidad and Tobago

A man at a desk staring at a matrix with the Trinidad and Tobago flag in the background, transparent.
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In Trinidad and Tobago, there is much discussion about crime because… well, there’s been a lot of crime, so much so that there’s a Wikipedia page on crime in Trinidad and Tobago. Every administration blames the last administration, playing checkers for getting elected, but the crime has risen through all involved political parties running things over the past 3 decades.

The latest stab – or shot – at crime seems to be giving everyone gun licenses. On the surface, it gives a lot of people a sense of security to be able to get something only criminals seem to have. Right after an election, any criticism of the present government is seen as ‘anti-UNC’ – the political party that won was UNC. Just as any criticism of the past administration was seen as ‘anti-PNM’.

It’s a tired way of shutting down valid conversations. I have seen it in every country I’ve lived in or visited. Group-think offers comfort, and that comfort rivals religion in its power.

I do not care for politics. Both major parties are interchangeable to me. I criticize what I know in the hope that something useful can grow through the cracks in the political concrete.

My Criticism Of Stand Your Ground Laws and Firearm User License Propagation.

Really, I don’t have much criticism of these ideas. I myself applied for a weapon more than once in Trinidad and Tobago some decades ago, where I was told behind closed doors who to bribe and who I would have to buy the gun from. Oddly, the present political party in charge then is the same party.

I do not have much issue with the idea of responsible gun ownership. I myself applied for a firearm license in Trinidad and Tobago more than once, decades ago. I was told who to bribe and who I would need to buy the weapon from.

My applications were “lost.”

I got the bureaucratic shuffle that corruption feeds on.

The thing about it is that I have owned guns in the United States for decades. I am a U.S. Navy veteran and having worked with the United States Marine Corps as their Corpsman, I got not only to train further with weapons but also further in dealing with the wounds. In essence, I know what I’m talking about.

The criticism is here: with more firearms licenses comes more guns to civilians. Training requirements aren’t very high, and the understanding of the responsibility of having a weapon is not seemingly making the rounds as much as the political grandstanding.

My Criticism of Stand Your Ground Laws and Firearm License Expansion

Legal access to guns means new risks. People who did not have firearms before could now shoot themselves or someone else by accident.

It might not happen often. It might happen frequently. But it will happen.
That risk depends entirely on how good the training is.

No one is talking about that. They should be.

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The Bribe

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I’m an honest person, which is something everyone says or writes at some point with various levels of integrity. I have references on this honesty, though, and I’ve managed to live my life without too much sway in this regard in adulthood. As I have grown older, I have been even more careful about what I say or write because inevitably, you have to live by it – unless you’re a politician, which I have had the good sense to not be.

I wasted a paragraph bastioning my honesty because I have, on occasion, had to flex, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America where antiquated bureaucracies make corruption possible, though there was one incident with a police officer in Orlando, Florida. You see, you can be honest, but the world itself is made up of systems that less scrupulous characters will take advantage of – but are they less scrupulous or themselves victims of a system? That’s a debate that is best looked at case by case.

One particular incident comes to mind when I think of bribery.

I was in Nicaragua in 2005, part of my wandering through Latin America that was blamed on the publisher of Linux Journal but was simply an opportunity for travel I refused to miss at that point in life. And, as I do, I made friends with people in Nicaragua, and had gotten passable at conversational Spanish.

The day before I was to leave Nicaragua – I think I was going to Colombia next, I don’t remember – a friend needed a lift from Managua to Lago Managua. I enjoyed driving in Nicaragua because of the vast stretches of beautiful landscape, and the old Yaris I had rented was a surprising pleasure to drive only because it was manual, allowing me to eek out every drop of horsepower from the tiny engine. So we went, and I dropped him to Lago Managua, where he was to wait for a boat to take him to the center of the lake where he was setting up internet connectivity – he would later work at Amazon.com – and, with nothing there, I wanted to get back quickly because I was hungry and he dismissed me.

Heading back to the hotel in Managua where I would spend my last night, I had the little Yaris as close to airborne as possible… and a large truck was relatively slowly making it’s way somewhere. I flew past, overtaking it, seeing another truck ahead of it, when in between I saw the car – and as I drew parallel, AK-47s poked their way out of the open windows at the little Yaris. At me. I was already past them at this point, and had the little Yaris screaming for more air at the top of  5th gear.

I really could have used one more cylinder in that engine at that point – I forget what they were driving, but they easily caught me. The flashing lights set me a little at ease, so I pulled over, turned the car off, threw the keys on the dash and placed my hands on the top of the steering wheel. This is the universal way to say, ‘I’m not reaching for anything’.

Once they- there were three of them – saw I was no threat, the rifles got pointed away. They were speaking to me in Spanish about not passing a police vehicle, driving recklessly, and so on – so I decided to not speak as much Spanish as I knew and got them to hand me the Spanish/English dictionary in the back seat of the car so that we could figure it all out. After all, they had the drop on me with automatic weapons, the car I was driving was certainly no RX-7 or muscle car, and I was a very long way from anywhere.

They threatened to take my driver’s license so that they could track me down for a fine, which wouldn’t work – I needed that driver’s license for the next country – and I explained that to them. And then, in halting Spanish, I asked, “Is there a way that we can fix this without getting all of that involved?”

Long story short – it cost me $3 US to get out of that issue, which was probably the whole point – that would easily buy a bottle of rum. I was fortunate they were satisfied with what was in my wallet as well as providing them a good story they could laugh at.

That was a bribe. But it was also a way to get out of a painful situation where I was very vulnerable. I don’t know much about Nicaraguan police, I don’t know that this was the norm or not, but I do know in that particular situation I was pretty happy to leave $3 less, intact, and in good stead with the local police.

The point here is that you can be as honest as you want, but sometimes the easiest path isn’t the one that systems push us toward – and that’s where corruption comes in. Could they have wagged their finger at me and let me go? Of course. They chose not to, because they took me down a path where they got to shake me down. And I allowed them to do so because the alternative they offered in their positional authority was not attractive at all.

My honesty, my integrity – that would have meant little to anyone had I not simply gave them what was in my wallet.

Technology, Bureaucracy and Corruption

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WireIt’s been an accepted opinion that technology reduces corruption. Examples abound. India is a popular example, and is mentioned in books (such as Performance Accountability and Combating Corruption) and articles on the Internet. And, at least in the ways that people are used to, corruption is mitigated. Reduced? Maybe.

It moves, or at least the potential for it does. And that is largely a good thing, where fewer people have the opportunity to profit from the bureaucratic systems put in place to manage things – be it land, licenses and permits, or registrations. With less human hands touching these things in the process, there is less injection of ‘human error’ – conscious or otherwise. And that, too, is a good thing since such human error slows things down to the point where the system is bypassed or ignored.

When the system is bypassed or ignored, the bureaucrats will say that it’s corruption and create Law that makes it illegal to – or they might actually start enforcing Law that already exists. They do this rather than fix the system as appropriate, which creates resentment in the populace. This simmers. Boils. And now and then, given the right circumstances, it erupts – and when it does, violent or not, those that boil over almost never have a plan for overhauling the systems if they are successful. The cycle continues.

Every sociopolitical space on the planet has these problems – it’s a matter of degree, and it’s a matter of Will to remedy these problems. In implementations of democracy around the world, this Will is rare to see used on things that are unpopular. Politicians like to get re-elected.

At some point, people might figure that out. At some point, people might identify this flaw on a collective level and do something about it – because that is the root of the problem.

The Will to fix things versus the Will to be re-elected.