Akash Sama­roo

While for­eign af­fairs ex­pert, Pro­fes­sor Andy Knight, be­lieves this coun­try’s Gov­ern­ment will be do­ing the right thing in sup­port­ing Mex­i­co in its le­gal bat­tle against US gun man­u­fac­tur­ers, po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst Dr Bish­nu Ra­goonath is ques­tion­ing if this is a po­lit­i­cal dis­trac­tion.

Dur­ing a Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) meet­ing in Barataria on Thurs­day, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said he was ac­tive­ly con­sid­er­ing an in­vi­ta­tion from Mex­i­co to join in the le­gal fight to hold US gun mak­ers ac­count­able for the de­struc­tion its weapons of de­struc­tion have had in sev­er­al coun­tries. He added that he sus­pects the pro­posed le­gal bat­tle, which will be un­der­tak­en in the US courts, is one of the things that will come out of the Cari­com crime sym­po­sium that will be held here in T&T from April 16-17.

“If you ask me what I want out of this con­fer­ence, over and above ed­u­cat­ing our pop­u­la­tion, I want Cari­com to speak as one voice to our ma­jor trad­ing part­ner – our friend in the north, with one voice to say to them: Amer­i­ca must do more to pre­vent guns from com­ing from Amer­i­ca in­to our coun­try!” Row­ley said.

Yes­ter­day, Pro­fes­sor Andy Knight told Guardian Me­dia that if the Prime Min­is­ter does de­cide to take up Mex­i­co’s of­fer, then T&T will be do­ing the right thing.

“My ini­tial re­ac­tion is that gun man­u­fac­tur­ers in the US have got­ten away with too much over the years. The deaths and may­hem caused by US-man­u­fac­tured guns are ex­tra­or­di­nary not on­ly in the US it­self but in sur­round­ing coun­tries where those US-man­u­fac­tured guns are be­ing il­le­gal­ly traf­ficked,” Knight said.

How­ev­er, he said it will be dif­fi­cult to pre­dict how the US gov­ern­ment will re­spond to the coun­tries join­ing Mex­i­co.

Ra­goonath, mean­while, does not be­lieve the move has the po­ten­tial to hurt this coun­try’s re­la­tion­ship with the US.

“It would not be­cause the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion has al­ready stat­ed that there are con­cerns about gun vi­o­lence and so on. If it was the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion then yes, prob­a­bly it would have caused greater chal­lenges.”

Ra­goonath’s con­cern, how­ev­er, is that there’s lit­tle chance of the le­gal chal­lenge suc­ceed­ing in the courts. He ques­tioned if this was a dis­trac­tion from the Gov­ern­ment to give the im­pres­sion that they are do­ing some­thing about il­le­gal guns.

“Guns are not on­ly com­ing in through il­le­gal ports and if the Gov­ern­ment is re­al­ly se­ri­ous about deal­ing with the gun trade, they should try to close those porous bor­ders and le­gal ports where guns are com­ing in, rather than try­ing to bring an ac­tion against a gun com­pa­ny whose busi­ness it is to make guns. They didn’t ask any­body to buy the guns, they didn’t tell any­one to shoot the guns, and that’s where my con­cerns lie in this mat­ter.”

Ra­goonath al­so won­dered why Mex­i­co ap­proached T&T for sup­port.

“I would be wary about it as to whether or not you’d want to sup­port the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment, what sort of re­la­tion­ship does Trinidad and To­ba­go have with them pri­or to this? I don’t know that we have had any re­al re­la­tion­ship with them.”