Last week, the Sunday Guardian reported on the cost and ease with which an illegal gun can be purchased in T&T. The proliferation of illegal weapons on the country’s streets is linked to an increase in robberies and murders. While the police display guns they have recovered, thousands of illegal firearms remain in the hands of criminals.
There is a human cost to gun violence, not just lives but livelihood. The wounds tell another aspect of the story on guns.
In Part 3 of this investigation into illegal guns and ammunition, we examine the wounds which people are showing up with at hospitals.
Senior Reporter-Investigative
jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt
There has been a marked increase in gunshot injuries caused by high-powered weapons. Dr Marlon Mencia, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Port-of-Spain General Hospital and lecturer at the University of the West Indies, said the cost of treating the increased gunshot wounds was ridiculously high in T&T, but no one truly understands that.
“Treating a gunshot wound uses resources beyond which you can quantify. There is blood and implants and other things, which are scarce resources in our settings,” he said.
The demand for this type of surgery makes it difficult or impossible sometimes for people in dire need of treatment and elective operations as hospital resources are under pressure.
The concerned doctor said, “Those same resources can go towards cancer patients and what we call elective surgeries and they can’t get it and nobody looks at that. Nobody looks at the cost.”
Mencia left T&T in 1995 and returned ten years later, having completed his studies, but before leaving, he could not recall seeing a gunshot wound caused by the 5.56 mm and 7.62mm ammunition. On his return, he noted a continued increase.
“We had gunshot wounds before, but nothing like what we are seeing now. In fact, the most common cause of a fracture to the femur was a road traffic accident. But now, you are seeing most people sustain those fractures by gunshot wounds and a higher percentage are with high-velocity weapons.
Mencia said the difference between a low and high-velocity weapon injury is very distinguishable, with the higher velocity injuries taking longer to heal and, in some cases, causing the bone to heal misaligned or with a deformity.
“The femur is the strongest bone in the body, you may have a bullet hitting the femur but not breaking it whereas a high-velocity missile will shatter the femur and damage the surrounding tissues.
“A lot of our fractures of the femur, which is the thigh bone, the tibia, which is the shin bone, come from gunshot injuries. But, of course, the higher velocity weapons cause more damage.
“We are definitely seeing an increase, over the years, in firearm injuries, but now an increase in high-velocity injuries causing fractures. But the problem is that all of this, all of this is anecdotal.”
At the Caricom Crime Symposium last April, Prof Andres Rengifo of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University (Newark) used an economic cost of US$350,000 per murder.
Rengifo, in his presentation, said that the more than 4,100 homicides (over 80 per cent involving firearms) since 2014 have cost the country more than $9.8 billion (TTD) in economic losses.
As the streets remain flooded with illegal weapons, retired regiment officer Major Dirk Barnes said beyond the evil of guns is ammunition.
“A rifle, versus a pistol, versus a machine gun, none of them is more powerful than the other. Let’s get that clear. If you understand that no weapon can be more powered than the other, it’s just pieces of machinery with moving parts, you will start to understand immediately that it doesn’t make sense trying to classify a weapon as a high-powered weapon. When you start to talk about weapons you have to look at the ammunition that weapon can discharge.”
Cost of ammunition
Data from the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) showed that between January 14 and October 19, 2023, more than 148,500 rounds of ammunition were recovered. The most common being the 9mm rounds which accounted for 34.6 per cent of all recoveries.
As of October 19, police seized 1,896 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition and 2,499 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition, the two types of ammunition used in rifles.
For that specified period, the police seized 11,942 rounds of 7.62 ammunition and 14,516 rounds of 5.56 ammunition.
Guardian Media’s investigation showed that a gun can be as low as $11,000 to as high as $50,000 depending on who you buy from and the type of gun purchased. A pistol can be bought for between $18,000 to $21,000; a shotgun for $11,000 to $15,000; a rifle can bleed your pockets for as much as $30,000 to $40,000; and a machine gun or sub-machine gun can cost between $35,000 to $40,000 with the AR15 and AK-47 costing between $40,000 to $52,000.
Ammunition is equally expensive as the street value can be at least six times the legal cost. A box of 9mm bullets, which contains 50 rounds, obtained legally costs $250 to $300. National security sources said a box can go for $1,000 to $2,000 on the streets. Meanwhile, 5.56mm and 7.62mm bullets can fetch $1,500 and $2,000 a box, respectively.
Barnes said the increased scrutiny placed on licensed gun owners and dealers meant that there was now meticulous checking of the stocks imported by gun dealers. He said as far as he was informed, every legal round of ammunition imported can be accounted for.
This, though, has been disputed by a senior police officer who asked to remain anonymous. The officer, with over two decades of policing, said ammunition can be sold by legal firearm holders to criminals after pretending to use the ammunition at gun ranges.
“There is no mechanism in place to ensure that the rounds bought to use on a range were, in fact, used. So you can buy two boxes legitimately, go to the range and fire two shots and sell the rest and return to the dealer and buy more,” he said.
Ballistics backlog dating back decades
In 2021, then national security minister Stuart Young commissioned the Special Evidence Recovery Unit (SERU) based in Cumuto. Then deputy police commissioner Mc Donald Jacob said the ballistics recovery department and trained ballistics experts would have assisted in expediting ballistic reports for use in court proceedings.
“The training of these graduates, which was a combined effort of the police academy and the Forensic Science Centre will assist tremendously in dealing with the ballistics backlog at the Forensic Science Centre and to deal with incoming ballistics very quickly,” Jacob said then.
In November last year, Jacob, who at the time was the acting top cop, said with SERU up and running, the wait time to identify ballistics and guns decreased significantly.
In that interview, he said guns were now traced within seven days and fingerprint analysis went from ten days to complete to 48 hours.
Ballistics reports can be received within 72 hours, he said.
Senior sources at the Forensic Science Centre said even with SERU, there still remains a backlog dating back decades.
“What SERU has is a database of all legal firearms but there is still a backlog at the Forensic Science Centre. What happens is when a case is called, they pull that file and get the certificate analysis completed for that case.”
The senior police officer said the ballistic backlog should have been cleared or in the process of being cleared after 19 police officers received ballistic training, with 14 being assigned to the Forensic Science Centre.
“Under Mc Donald Jacob there was a one-stop shop where the armorers and ballistics experts were at SERU and would expedite cases on requests for both the armorer and ballistic reports. Because of the volume of reports to be done, I don’t think the backlog has been cleared but if a case is urgent, say it’s for trial, the reports can be expedited.”
As the TTPS aims to increase its focus on scientific evidence, the backlog at the Forensic Science Centre was identified as something that needed to be addressed.
Meanwhile, the US will also fund a regional forensic science centre to focus on firearms and ammunition.
The St Lucia-based centre was announced at the end of the Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) meeting in Nassau, Bahamas, in July.
The US said the assistance to construct the regional forensic science centre was aimed at bringing the Caribbean up to international standards that will meet the International Organisation for Standardisation (IOS) accreditation.
“The project will support the collection of timely, reliable, and admissible forensic evidence to support criminal investigations and prosecutions, increase efficiency, and help lower case backlogs,” it said.
Legal guns in the illegal trade
In a sworn statement filed by Police Commissioner Erla Harewood-Chrsitopher in May, the top cop said over 100 legally sold guns have been used to commit crimes of murder, robberies and suicides.
Harewood-Christopher, who filed the statement in a case against gun dealer Towfeek Ali who is suing the State for not allowing him to import over three million rounds of assorted ammunition, said the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and other foreign agencies informed the police that some 30 guns imported by authorised gun dealers ended up in the hands of criminals, with at least one being used in a murder.
The statement came even after ammunition found at the crime scene had the marking TTPS and TTR which represented the police and regiment.
While the police’s investigation into how its rounds ended up at crime scenes is still ongoing, the Defence Force, in May, said all of its ammunition was accounted for and could not explain how those shell casings with those markings ended up at crime scenes.
Lieutenant Colonel Sheldon Ramanan in his capacity as Inspector General of the Defence Force, at the request of Chief of Defence Staff Air Vice Marshal Darryl Daniel, did an internal audit and found that all of the ammunition given to the regiment were accounted for.