The promise of a stand-your-ground law was dangerous and Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley is urging citizens to reject it.
At the PNM’s sport and family day at the Toco Composite High School, Dr Rowley said arming all citizens was not the answer to the country’s crime problems.
He was referencing the UNC leaders promise to enact stand-your-ground legislation once re-elected.
Rowley said, “When the Opposition Leader says that their answer to their supporters’ call for defense from the criminal element is to pass in the Parliament of this country, stand-your-ground legislation, I want to ask the Opposition Leader: what ground are they going to stand on to kill anybody they want to kill and simply say, ‘I was afraid of that person,’ or, ‘That person was about to attack me in the road or in my yard, and I killed them.’”
He said such American-based legislation were currently being challenged in US states that had passed it.
He warned that such laws allowed “some people who hate other people” to use it for “legal murder.”
Rowley also slammed pundits Dr Bramanand Rambachan and Satyanand Maharaj for comments they made last Wednesday, suggesting that citizens of East Indian descent were being targeted by urban youths from the East-West Corridor.
Rowley said guns for all was not the answer and took aim at the comment made by Maharaj saying, “When the Opposition Leader, and two or any other number of pundits want to get up in this country and say that the crime we are all facing that we are all exposed to, that we are all victims of. When they want to get up and say that it is Black people who are attacking Indian people. I say today: you all stop that! Don’t go down that road! That is a road of no return.”
He labelled the proposal as “dog whistling” and called on his supporters to reject the notion of crime and criminality linked to race with one targeting the other.
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