We Must Encourage The Production Of Locally Made Guns - Kwesi Ahwoi Suggests

Guns they say don�t kill; people kill people and if this saying is anything to go by, then we must all buy into the idea of supporting our local craft men to manufacture locally made guns as the Interior minister has suggested. In a meeting with the press, Mr. Kwesi Ahwoi explained that his outfit has currently received a proposal from the UN, informing Ghana to consider authorizing and licensing the locally made weapons. According to him, if the nation intends to minimize conflicts, then the time has come to encourage people who have made the production of locally made guns an underground activity, come up above the ground and be given the needed support. This he says, would aid the security agencies smoothly regulate the activities of the manufacturers. �Every conflict that we encounter has elements of possessions of these locally manufactured weapons which are not registered and known�I am seriously supporting that we should as a country consider legitimizing this particular activity otherwise, the blacksmithing industry is dying. They used to make cutlasses, now they have improved and making guns meanwhile, we give permits to import guns from America and Britain. If we can manufacture the guns here, we don�t encourage that so that we can buy locally made guns and give job to our people�, he suggested. Briefing the media about the works concerning small arms and light weapons under the conflict resolution and disaster management, Mr. Kwesi Ahwoi stated that �the commission has marked over ten thousand weapons of twelve units of the Ghana Armed Forces in the Greater Accra Region, which constitutes about 75 to 80% of the total GAF weapons in the region. The whole idea is to give numbers and serial numbers and be able to trace holders of the guns.� He further disclosed that a setup commission has conducted a base line assessment of the nature of the small arm problem in Ghana. The result of that survey, according to him, is to inform a national strategy for small arms control. �Indeed, they have done a comparative legislative analysis of Ghana�s laws on firearms and the ECOWAS convention on small arms to harmonize and to draft new law or legislation on small arms and light weapons... the agency has trained 29 personnel from various security agencies and the attorney general department, in investigating and prosecuting fire arm trafficking offenses�, he added.