YFF: Belizeans Want Toy Guns Banned


In August of last year, Youth for the Future launched a campaign to ban the sale of toy guns. They've held high school debates, toy gun drives, and consultations and now the report is in. Today Youth for the Future released the findings of its national anti-imitation gun survey. Four hundred people, a majority of them youths were polled, and, no surprise here, YFF's Director Linsford Castillo says that by a landslide, Belizeans want toy guns banned.

Linsford Castillo, Director - YFF
"The consensus is that the Belizean public feels that we should ban the importation of toy guns in the country. In fact percentage wise, from the sample size that we interviewed as mentioned earlier, almost 88% of those that we interviewed are saying we should ban the sale of toy guns. Most interestingly too, from what we found out, is that out of the amount of respondents interviewed, we came up with a direct linkage between persons who are exposed to toy guns and those who eventually ended up owning a real gun or possess or come in contact with a real gun. So all that is given in detail in the report and that is basically what we wanted to make public today."

Keith Swift,
So what now?

Linsford Castillo,
"The next step for us and what we did this morning is that we invited the Attorney General's office specifically to present the findings to them so that the next step forward is that some sort of legislation would be enacted where at the end of the day it would be basically illegal to import toy guns into the country through our various ports."

Technical assistance for the survey was provided by the University of Belize.

Have any children with toy guns been shot or killed in Belize.

I know of several that have been killed in Northern Island.

I support the no toy gun ideal. We get toy guns put in our Christmas donations here and always remove them. Strangely a Christian group sent down alot of toys for the kids here and also alot of toy guns, what were they thinking!!!!!

This 'toy' debate has gone on for years and will continue to go on for more. Personally imo, a ban on any kind of toys is really dumb. Kids will be kids. They will pick up sticks, point fingers etc. and say "bang bang". What are you going to do then? Cut off their fingers?

Owning a gun/weapon is not a bad thing, it's the person that uses it wrong that is dangerous, not the weapon. Responsible people don't abuse them....... TEACH children that they are a dangerous weapon.......EDUCATE.

I was raised with a whole closet full of weapons in our house. My family deer, elk, bird hunted so we had many different weapons. I also was taught that my ass would be beat to a bloody pulp if i EVERY went into that room without supervision and the weapons were NEVER to be touched without an adult.

I respect them to this day. And yes, I do own weapons and would not hesitate to use them should the need arise. The more you restrict something the more something is wanted.

I too had guns everywhere when I lived in Montana no big deal. A child will play with a soccer ball if he has one, or a gun if he has one. I think a ban on toy guns in the stores is a bit unrealistic, but as adults the wiser decision is the soccer ball!!

I am not against guns or toy guns it is not the gun that kills.

I played with toy guns and was trained by the best with real guns.

I think the point is there are more real guns on the street now and you can not tell if the one they have is real or a toy, so you shoot first and some one could die.

Can you not bring 100 footballs so we can teach them to play together and not shoot each other.

Quite a few kids have been shot dead by police when they were brandishing replica guns (calling them "toy" can be severely misleading) and the police couldn't tell the difference, and this will continue to happen.

I have mixed feelings over the American tradition of private ownership of firearms (fundamentally I'm agin it) but I don't see how any rational adult can want to encourage kids to take up guns. Perhaps this is the same logic as used by the shop that supplied the recent campus gunman, who said "they wished they had supplied more guns to the other kids so they could have defended themselves". Do the KVarners of this world really want a bloodbath round every street corner? What is his view on knives, now used to commit more than half of the murders in the UK?

Like Inplub I have used many guns in my time and for a while had a personal pistol, but at best I regard them as a necessary evil.

I was brought up around guns, taught at an early age to shoot accurately, to break a gun down, clean it, inspect it, and put it back together. I HATE GUNS. Dad was an American Indian, who only hunted for food, asked forgiveness of everything before he shot it, the family ate every possible part of the slain animal, and I still HATE GUNS. People like KVarner use guns as extensions to their penises, thinking he's not a man without a huge one. Give me a man who can be gentle, loving of every creature, who would rather discuss at length rather than shoot to solve problems, and I'm turned on to the max. Show me a guy who thinks guns are the answer to the problems, and I'm outraged. This is my opinion, and we are all entitled on one, so if you don't agree, tough. I allowed my son to have toy guns as a kid, and now he has his favorite pieces, but they aren't hand guns, they aren't assault weapons. They are shotguns used just for hunting. Please don't send guns to San Pedro. Nothing good will come out of it. Those kids are just as happy playing ball, and they don't need the exposure to things that have the potential of changing the island way of life.

my dad & males in the family hunted a lot and i with him. i was a very small kid and the guns hurt my arm (shotguns) and shoulder so i never shot. they scare the heck out of me. very powerful. subject to accident. bestows godlike powers on anyone who holds em in a threatening fashion. shudder.

above my pay grade to say who gets em. but whichever tribe had em as the white man took over controlled the land and all the people on it, til the white man took it himself. strong medicine.

Very true, Marty. Guns beget misplaced power, and usually, no good comes out of them. We are still reeling from the horrific VATECH shootings, in our back yard, and the thought of guns in the hands of the ignorant scares the bejeezies out of me.