Ot­to Car­ring­ton

A lo­cal firearms ex­pert and se­cu­ri­ty an­a­lyst is ask­ing for a de­f­i­n­i­tion of an as­sault weapon.

Dirk Barnes is seek­ing clar­i­fi­ca­tion fol­low­ing the de­ci­sion by Cari­com Heads of Gov­ern­ment to ban the use of as­sault weapons by civil­ians.

Barnes, who has more than three decades of ex­pe­ri­ence with firearms, says he wants the clar­i­fi­ca­tion be­cause pro­hib­it­ed weapons are al­ready de­fined in the Firearms Act.

“No Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice that I am aware of and none of the peo­ple that I have come across own pro­hib­it­ed weapons. Pro­hib­it­ed weapons can on­ly be used ... by mem­bers of the armed forces. So the as­sault weapon that the Prime Min­is­ter spoke about, I’m yet to get the de­f­i­n­i­tion for the as­sault weapon cat­e­go­ry be­cause it does not ex­ist in law.”

In his clos­ing re­marks at the Cari­com Crime Sym­po­sium, Vi­o­lence as a Pub­lic Health Is­sue - The Crime Chal­lenge on Tues­day evening, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced that one of the mea­sures Cari­com lead­ers had agreed to at the two-day sum­mit was was a ban of as­sault ri­fles.

Barnes said fol­low­ing the an­nounce­ment, he in­struct­ed his at­tor­ney to make a Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion re­quest to the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil for a de­f­i­n­i­tion of an as­sault weapon.

“An au­to­mat­ic weapon is any weapon, any weapon that if you pull the trig­ger, it fires mul­ti­ple rounds, so that one trig­ger pull, when you re­lease, it stops. In a se­mi-au­to­mat­ic weapon that we are al­lowed to car­ry, when you pull the trig­ger, one round would be dis­charged and then if it gets on an­oth­er round, down the range, you have to let go of the trig­ger and pull the trig­ger again. That is se­mi-au­to­mat­ic,” he ex­plained.

“Hand­guns, for ex­am­ple, are se­mi-au­to­mat­ics, most ri­fles are se­mi-au­to­mat­ic, and hunt­ing ri­fles and shot­guns are se­mi-au­to­mat­ic. There are au­to­mat­ic vari­a­tions to those cat­e­gories as well and in some cas­es, those are the things that are con­sid­ered in oth­er ter­ri­to­ries as as­saults weapons."

He added, “I have even heard peo­ple use the term an as­sault weapon as any weapon that was made for war. I chal­lenge peo­ple when you say that. Then a sim­ple Glock 19 was made for war. Those hand­guns, near­ly every sin­gle hand­gun, was de­signed for war.”

Barnes is con­cerned that the pro­hi­bi­tion will af­fect pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers.

“I am a se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­ny own­er, I go out with my teams, I re­cov­er stolen ve­hi­cles, I pro­vide es­corts for peo­ple when they are go­ing to the banks and some­times we have to move with those weapons be­cause we know the threat lev­els that we have to go up against,” he said.

“You take my weapons away from me, who is that ben­e­fit­ing?”

He al­so de­scribed the sym­po­sium as “two days of some Heads of Gov­ern­ment hav­ing some fun at our ex­pense and drink­ing wine and eat­ing at the Hy­att. That’s all I saw. But com­ing out of it, I’m not see­ing so­lu­tions.”

Barnes was al­so crit­i­cal of what he said was a de­ci­sion to “ban some­thing which is al­ready banned by our laws and try­ing to dis­arm law-abid­ing cit­i­zens to ben­e­fit crim­i­nals.”