By Gordon Barlow

When Cayman’s criminal gangs first began to get out of hand, we began locking all the doors and ground-floor windows when we left the house, and at night. Later, we locked them when we were home upstairs. Later still, we locked the upstairs windows, too, at night. We promised ourselves that if burglar-bars ever became necessary it would be time to leave Cayman. We couldn’t see ourselves living behind barred windows. What kind of life would that be?

And yet, now, forty years later, here we are living behind barred windows and double-locked doors. We got used to it. But what will we have to do next, to protect ourselves and our property? No cutlasses or kitchen-knives, I think. We’re not skilled in their use. The average home-invader, fresh from his gang’s self-defence training, would take five seconds to disarm me of my weapon – and would be all the more angry for my disrespect. There is no advantage in making an invader angry. It doesn’t seem to do any good anywhere else in the world.

(When I started on my travels with Linda in the Near and Middle East as a young man, I used to carry a knife in a sheath on my belt, thinking it might be a disincentive to prospective muggers. A fellow traveller told me that in the areas I was headed for a knife was more of a provocation, and that if my skills in a knife-fight were inferior to a challenger’s I could end up dead. That made sense. Thereafter, my protection was a rolled umbrella with a rough-edged point.

Umbrellas aren’t threatening, and they’re useful walking-sticks. And, I did once actually brandish it while chasing a mugger who had snatched Linda’s handbag in Egypt; I didn’t catch him, but he did drop the bag!)

There is an ongoing debate in Cayman over whether residents should be licensed to keep guns at home. Or maybe just citizens. Or citizens with clean Police records. Or citizens vouched for by our local politicians. Oh, but whoa! That’s how political gangs begin, isn’t it? Huh. I would trust myself to choose wisely, and those of my friends wise enough to trust me; but nobody else. Some gun-advocates want six-dollars-an-hour security-guards to be armed, so as to discourage robberies of shops and banks. If that ever comes into law, the very least the guards should do is hold up their employers for more money…

What about policemen? Some policemen are armed already, though we don’t see them waving pistols around in public. Given the frequency with which police officers are involved in traffic accidents, they might be less dangerous with guns than with cars, or cellphones. Some of them, you’d rather they were loading their guns while driving, than texting.

As for armed householders – well, unless we’re going to be walking around the house with loaded guns stuck in our waistbands (and the workplace, and the supermarket, and the restaurant), and sleeping with them under our pillows, what protection would they provide? All a bad man has to do is point his gun at you through your barred window and say, “Open the door by the count of three or I’ll kill you. One, two, three.” Once inside he steals your guns and ammo and sits with you while his colleague takes your debit-card down to the ATM.

Of course that would only happen once or twice, before all the expats put their families onto planes to somewhere else.

Maybe a victim’s neighbours would form a vigilante posse and search every place the invader might be hiding. But how many of them would be seen off by other armed householders? Ridiculous, but what else can be done?

Gordon Barlow
Gordon Barlow has lived in Cayman since 1978. He was the first full-time Manager of the Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce (1986-1988)- a turbulent period as the Chamber struggled to establish its political independence. He has publicly commented on social and political issues since 1990, and in 1998 served as the secretary of two committees of the ‘Vision 2008’ exercise. He has represented the Chamber at several overseas conferences, and the Cayman Islands Human Rights Committee at an international symposium in Gibraltar in 2004.
You can view all his blogs at: https://barlowscayman.blogspot.com