Worse than a movie

This was a fete where young people had gathered and yet, if we are to accept the reports, you had the ominous threat of a young man walking around with a gun in his waist. That, it seems, has become acceptable conduct.

The young man felt justified in using a gun to resolve an argument that had broken out. What madness is this? The killings in Curepe speak, yet again, to the availability of guns that are not manufactured in this country. So ubiquitous are firearms that one now has to expect this at public gatherings, bikini or no.

We take comfort in the fact that, time and time again, the police are able to report seizing illicit firearms, taking these off the streets.

But are the police getting everything? Are they even making a dent in this illegal gun trade? What proportion of the total black market is commandeered? The brutal irony is while this murder took place in a public place, has been captured on video and has now been viewed by thousands around the country, the wheels of justice are not likely to turn any faster.

The detection rate remains at 17 per cent. But worse, the conviction rate at the level of jury trial remains so low as to be moot.

Abolish jury trials? First we need trials to happen.

While the verdict is out on jury trials, the same is not the case in relation to preliminary inquiries which all sides seem to agree must go. So will they? For the second year in a row, national security and policing have taken the largest price of the Budget. Billions of dollars have been spent. Are we improving? When will the results stop being long-term, medium-term and start bearing fruit? Citizens cannot afford to wait.

They are dying.

Meanwhile, we cannot imagine what must be going through the mind of a person who would end a human life just so in the heat of an argument. To take away a human being from his wife, husband, children, mother, father, friends. To irreversibly end all of that person’s hopes, dreams. To pretend to be a god and to snuff out a flame which no man has lit.

The solution to this is not vengeance.

It is to sit down and seriously question the assumptions on which this country is built.

We are all rightly concerned about the Budget, the economy, our religious festivals, our schooling, our sovereignty. Are we truly concerned about doing what is required to save human lives? Are we getting our priorities right? Yesterday, the nation awoke to the front-page news that Theresa Liverpool, the 52-year-old mother of a murder victim, died of a broken heart. Her 23-year-old son was beaten and stabbed to death on October 3.

Worse than a movie. More like hell, and it is being played out right here, right now.