BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) – Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley, is encouraging regional governments  to ensure that citizens see the benefit of using firearms for protection and not destruction.

Speaking on Thursday during the closing ceremony for Exercise Tradewinds 2024 (EXTW24), Mottley said the exercise has “elevated the extent to which ordinary people now understood that guns could be used in circumstances to commit crime or to protect region’s borders from criminal activities.”

She added that as an environment of rising homicides by gun violence per capita continues in countries across the region, there is the need for more opportunities for young people to join organisations such as cadets, the Boy Scouts, and other service clubs.

Mottley emphasised that the expansion in service organisations was necessary to expose young people to the importance of service and how to handle weapons.

“The Barbados Defence Force has been supportive in continuing to expand its Cadet Programme and its Sea Cadet Programme…. As physical circumstances allow us, I actually would like for us to be able to ensure that every boy and every girl, as they become teenagers in this country, are exposed to this service organisation.”

“A time will come where it will not only be the men and women in uniform who will be called into service, but it will actually be the people of this nation who must stand up to the call, more likely than not, especially in circumstances of small island states, whose capacity to survive can be terminated within a few hours…,” she continued.

Mottley stressed that “a gun is a tool that kills. It doesn’t walk and even with AI, it doesn’t yet talk. Therefore, it comes back to the basic integrity of the individuals in our society to determine how to treat weapons with respect.” “I want to commend the exercise because I saw on the weekend, you opened up to people of this nation and I saw families come and bring their children. We will not be able to obliterate guns from the earth because regrettably it is here. But like with everything else we do with our children, it is to teach them to respect how they use weapons,” she argued.

Mottley further stated that the exercise, held over the last two weeks, was “the evidence of what calling on each other looks like, and what it feels like”, as regional forces prepare themselves for any eventuality.

Exercise Tradewinds 2024 was held in Barbados from May 4 to 16.