The Ba­hamas gov­ern­ment says it has joined a brief filed by Mex­i­co in the Unit­ed States Court of Ap­peal in the First Cir­cuit, in sup­port of a US$10 bil­lion suit to hold US gun man­u­fac­tur­ers li­able for the harm caused by their prod­ucts.

The Ba­hamas has been joined by An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and To­ba­go, as well as the Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean Net­work for Hu­man Se­cu­ri­ty (SEHLAC), a net­work of non-gov­ern­ment or­gan­i­sa­tions and af­fil­i­at­ed pro­fes­sion­als spe­cial­iz­ing in in­ter­na­tion­al hu­man­i­tar­i­an law and seek­ing dis­ar­ma­ment in the Latin Amer­i­can and the Caribbean re­gion.

The named de­fen­dants in the US$10 bil­lion suit in­clude sev­en ma­jor gun man­u­fac­tur­ers and one gun whole­saler and dis­trib­u­tor.

“The guns used in the com­mis­sion of vi­o­lent crimes in The Ba­hamas are not man­u­fac­tured here, but in­stead, are man­u­fac­tured abroad and il­le­gal­ly traf­ficked across our bor­ders,” ac­cord­ing to a state­ment is­sued by the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter an­nounc­ing Nas­sau’s de­ci­sion to join the le­gal bat­tle.

“A crit­i­cal el­e­ment of the gov­ern­ment’s ef­fort to re­duce vi­o­lent crime in our coun­try is crack­ing down on the pro­lif­er­a­tion of firearms, with par­tic­u­lar fo­cus on strength­en­ing bor­ders and en­try points and on in­ter­rupt­ing net­works of il­le­gal smug­glers.

“To­day, as part of this broad­er ef­fort to re­duce the im­pact of gun vi­o­lence in The Ba­hamas, our coun­try joined an am­i­cus cu­ri­ae (friend of the court) brief in the Unit­ed States Court of Ap­peal in the First Cir­cuit, in sup­port of Mex­i­co, who is ap­peal­ing their case to hold US gun man­u­fac­tur­ers li­able for the harm caused by their prod­ucts,” the state­ment added.

Ear­li­er this month, Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Prime MIn­is­ter Dr. Kei­th Row­ley, ad­dress­ing a po­lit­i­cal meet­ing of his rul­ing Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM), said that Mex­i­co de­spite hav­ing lost an ini­tial ap­proach to US au­thor­i­ties “in­tends to con­tin­ue fight­ing.

“Mex­i­co has ap­proached CARI­COM ask­ing us as in­de­pen­dent sov­er­eign states with the same prob­lem to join the fight to test it in the courts of Amer­i­ca to hold the man­u­fac­tur­ers and dis­trib­u­tors of hand­guns and as­sault weapons in­to our coun­try, to hold them re­spon­si­ble for the may­hem that they have un­leashed on our so­ci­eties,” Row­ley said, adding “we have to join that fight”.

Row­ley said Amer­i­ca had passed laws to pre­vent gun own­ers from be­ing sued, adding those who are mak­ing those guns know­ing where they are go­ing and what they could do, have been in­su­lat­ed from law­suits.

“But re­cent­ly a cou­ple of peo­ple had sued the gun man­u­fac­tur­ers in Amer­i­ca and won. So the dam has cracked,” he said, even as he ac­knowl­edged this was a dif­fi­cult fight be­cause one could buy guns all over Amer­i­ca in most states.

“In oth­er words, you could just go and buy a firearm like how you buy bread. And once that be­comes so, we Trinida­di­ans are all over the place, they (the gun will) come to us from Con­necti­cut, Al­aba­ma, Mi­a­mi, Texas, and Geor­gia and they end up in Trinidad and To­ba­go,” Row­ley said.

In the court brief, the coun­tries claim that “un­law­ful traf­fick­ing of Amer­i­can firearms must be cur­tailed at its source: the U.S. gun in­dus­try.

“The gun man­u­fac­tur­ers and dis­trib­u­tors from a sin­gle na­tion must not be per­mit­ted to hold hostage the law-abid­ing cit­i­zens of an en­tire re­gion of the world’, and notes that the gov­ern­ments of the par­tic­i­pat­ing coun­tries ‘have a solemn du­ty to pro­tect the lives, health, and se­cu­ri­ty of their cit­i­zens’.

The state­ment notes that the “brief ar­gues that US gun in­dus­try prac­tices, in­clud­ing the bulk sales of guns to deal­ers who are known to en­gage in prac­tices cor­re­lat­ed with il­le­gal weapons smug­gling, have caused sig­nif­i­cant harm to the coun­tries in the Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean re­gion.

“The brief points to the in­crease in gun vi­o­lence in The Ba­hamas, in­clud­ing col­lat­er­al dam­age to un­in­tend­ed vic­tims, in­clud­ing Ba­hami­an chil­dren caught in the cross­fire in re­cent years.”

An­oth­er ex­am­ple of harm cit­ed in the brief in­cludes the use of firearms by Hait­ian gangs in vi­o­lent crimes and kid­nap­ping, which has led many Hait­ian mi­grants to flee their coun­try.

The brief ar­gues that the US dis­trict court could or­der the de­fen­dants, the US gun man­u­fac­tur­ers, “to re­duce the vi­o­lence com­mit­ted abroad in­volv­ing their prod­ucts by adopt­ing ‘rea­son­able re­tail and man­u­fac­tur­ing prac­tices”, in­clud­ing re­frain­ing from sup­ply­ing the small num­ber of deal­ers ‘whose mis­con­duct pre­cip­i­tates the vast ma­jor­i­ty of il­le­gal firearms traf­fick­ing’, com­mit­ting to on­ly work with deal­ers who take mea­sures to en­sure the guns are not sold to crim­i­nals, and mak­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing changes that would re­duce the harm caused by the guns.