The U.S. has a gun drawback, as its often occurring mass shootings and different gun violence clearly illustrate. However that drawback is just not solely confined to the home sphere. For many years, the Caribbean has been grappling with the unlawful influx of firearms from the US. In a nutshell, the U.S. home gun drawback can also be fueling a regional unlawful gun-trafficking drawback.
What’s extra, this gun-trafficking drawback straight impacts one in every of Washington’s closest European allies, France, via its Caribbean island territories, Martinique and Guadeloupe. In consequence, Caribbean international locations can and may search to make use of France’s—and by extension the European Union’s—geographical presence within the area as leverage to get the U.S. to noticeably tackle the problem. However first France should start to deal with this problem not solely as a safety drawback, however as a social and financial one domestically, and a political one regionally.
In April 2023, the Small Arms Survey and the Caribbean Group, or CARICOM, printed an alarming report that discovered that “greater than half of the homicides dedicated within the Caribbean area contain the usage of a firearm.” It additional concluded that “there’s little doubt that the US is a serious supply of illicit firearms within the Caribbean, and doubtless the most important supply in some states and territories” there.
