S3 E12 Turks and Caicos Ammo Trap - and about the drug problem?

While Joe Biden welcomes Illegal Immigrants, innocent American tourists are held hostage for thousands of dollars in the Turks and Caicos Islands, arrested for possessing ammunition even without a gun. Tourists and citizens are being machine gunned on their roads and beaches, and in response parents are separated from their children on a technicality that has no impact on law enforcement or public safety.

TCI should attack the underlying problem.  The world community should stop attacking the gun, and look at drugs and government corruption. 

Rescuing Brittney Griner, a deliberate drug smuggler, did not help with the optics. 

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

US Citizens arrested and prosecuted for possessing ammo while on vacation in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Was prosecution in the interest of public safety or just another act of  extortion against American citizens - today on the 10th Man

Introduction

What do Ryan Watson of Oklahoma, Bryan Hagerich of Pennsylvania, Michael Wenrich of Virginia, and Sharitta Grier of Florida all have in common? All four went on vacation in the former British colony of Turks and Caicos Islands, or “TCI”.  All four were arrested for being in possession of ammunition.  They didn’t shoot and injure or kill anyone. They didn’t fire a gun at all.  Indeed they didn’t even have a gun with them.  They just had ammunition, and that was an accident.  Not guns.  Just ammunition. The minimum penalty for this crime in TCI, if you can even call this event a crime – is twelve years in prison.

People are saying it’s their own fault, and many gun haters are gleefully saying they deserve to be punished.  But do they? Or is that just a culture that hates gun owners talking? What law did they break, what is the purpose of that law, and how effective are these arrests in making Turks and Caicos a better place?

Situation in T&C

Turks & Caicos Islands is a British Overseas Territory between the Bahamas and Haiti.  It’s considered a high-end tourist destination; the Khardashians vacation there.  Its beach is rated by Travel Advisor as the finest in the world, even though drug gangs are now machine gunning tourists there.  

A British government web site says the crime rate is “relatively low”.  Relative to what?, you might wonder. The Guardian reports the nation is “engulfed” in gang warfare. Warfare over drugs.  The local police are overwhelmed.

Those police, along with the government are incompetent and corrupt, with two high officials - the Deputy Premier and the Island Attorney both being convicted not too long ago.  Britain had to suspend the government in 2009 and impose direct rule due to systematic corruption.  

In response to this crime wave over drug wars, the government   - which already prohibited ownership of unlicensed firearms and ammunition - increased the penalty to a minimum sentence of twelve years.  It had previously been five years until 2018 when it was increased to seven then to twelve in 2022.  Unstated is how many native-born criminals were being put into prison under the lower sentences. You can pass all the laws you want, but they do no good without equitable enforcement.

Meanwhile the penalty for drug possession is just two years, according to GOV.UK, the British information web site. We’ll talk more about this backward ratio later.

Since the police are overwhelmed, the criminals are fighting back.  Supposedly TCI is also prosecuting its own citizens of firearm possession.  If they are, it seems to be deterring no one. 

In fact, at least one American citizen met an even worse fate than our countrymen imprisoned for firearm possession. Kent Carter a 40 year old Virginia man vacationing with his girlfriend at a 5-star hotel was shot to death in an ambush with automatic weapons. Carter's girlfriend was also injured in the incident with the total of five shot two of whom died.

This is yet another example of a shooting in another country which was reported in the United states but nobody here ever called it a mass shooting because mass shootings supposedly only occurred in the US.  It's all the more amazing because the gunmen did actually use military weapons, full auto AK-47s. Not that they need a gun to kill you.  A New York public defender – a woman - was strangled to death at the Club Med resort there in 2018.  Americans make more frequent victims of crime in TCI, than perpetrators. 

The American tourists who were arrested of course not only lacked automatic weapons but they had no weapons of any kind. They were arrested just for having ammunition. Even though ammunition is useless all by itself. These tourists didn't have an AR15, they didn't have a Glock, they didn't have a bump stock or any of the other scary items that the gun-law-obsessed want to outlaw to make us safe. All they had was the ammunition with no way to set it off.

What Really Happened

Everything about this situation is illogical but the astounding part is practically unreported:

ABC news said on may 24th That Hagerich faced a possible 12 year sentence “for possessing guns or ammunition”. They said that ammunition was found in his checked luggage.

Well if I were found trying to smuggle ammunition INTO the country I could see how the police might take notice. But Hagerich was arrested as he was leaving the country.  Their version of TSA inspecting his suitcase as he was checking in for his flight HOME found the ammunition inside.  Doesn't that raise a lot of questions apart from the severity of their laws?

The same is true of all four of our examples. Hegerich,  Watson, Wenrich and Grier - all four were arrested at the Turks and Caicos airport for possessing ammunition while trying to leave the country.

Well, there's an idea for Joe Biden. If he refuses to do anything about people bringing fentanyl into the country maybe you go down to the border and arrest anyone trying to take it out of the country. It makes as much sense as what’s happening in Turks and Caicos.

Seriously all the gun grabbers are saying things like well these people knew what the law was and they ,still took ammunition into a country where it was illegal. OK,fine, but explain how enforcing that law at the airport as people are leaving makes the country safer.

Think about it. You're anxious to enforce your country's firearms laws because you think that will make you safer. That's the principle they're going on. So why then wouldn't you put that same man who found the bullets in that luggage going OUT of the country over at the desk that’s inspecting luggage coming INTO the country were it might do some good? Purpose. Purpose. Remember the Purpose - They passed a law to be a deterrent to keep ammunition out but it's not working because they're not enforcing it. They're not using the law to keep ammunition out; they're using the law to keep ammunition from leaving, which are two opposite results.

OK with all the hoopla surrounding these cases, with the human interest stories about the father in jail and the family waiting for him to come home. The children without a father - why has there been no discussion of the fact that their strict gun laws are not doing anything except punishing people who made no attempt to commit any crime.

That nation is benefiting from a revenue stream however. If the guy on the outbound desk can find 2 bullets hidden behind a flap in a suitcase it seems the guy on the inbound desk could just as easily find it. Maybe he did but he let it slide, while marking that passenger for special scrutiny on the OUTBOUND flight. The American tourist continues on his way, spends lots of American dollars in Turks and Caicos and then they tap him on the shoulder when he tries to go home. And world opinion looks down on gun owners so much that no one is criticizing this failed government for the obvious scam. A scam is what it looks like. Giving American tourists the old shakedown is one of the oldest crimes there is. Letting them in but not letting them out. Turks and Caicos is not only getting away with it but being encouraged by the rest of the world and by world opinion. It's only a small step for TCI  to start planting bullets in the luggage of people who don't even own a gun. Arresting them when they're leaving is as brilliant as it is preposterous. They come in they bring their family they spend a lot of time they spend a lot of money. Then they have to pay more to get out. Usually when there is a crime there's a victim. With this so-called crime there is no victim except the innocent tourist

Don’t forget that these bags have actually been inspected three times. Twice before the ammunition was found. Don't think the TSA does not look at those bags. They definitely do. Ironically one of our victims, Sharita Greer had her bag opened by TSA and her body wash and body lotion were both seized by agents. But two very small bullets for her self-defense pistol in a flap of the lining of her suitcase were overlooked by these professionals, and she’s held accountable.

TSA says “not our fault it's your job to make sure there's no contraband in your luggage”. TSA says you should have separate suitcases for inside the US and outside; if you take your bag to the shooting range you should never use that bag to travel with. 

And TSA is part of the government, so the government lets them get away with this excuse. They have been for some time - TSA's missing something on the outgoing inspection and its being found later is an old story. Musician Cliff Waddel was stopped in January 2023 with a gun in his bag while trying to board a flight from Nashville to Raleigh. Turns out he'd flown into Nashville with the same bag the day before and TSA didn't say anything then. So he had to pay a fine for the presence of the gun but the TSA agent who missed it when he’s paid to find it - well that individual wasn't even identified, let alone punished.

If the two bullets were truly a danger, then it seems you’d punish the paid inspectors for not finding them BEFORE they got on an airplane.  Not the tourist who made a mistake, who’s punished after nothing happened.

Anti-Gun Hysteria

This is the result of anti-gun hysteria. Because so many people in our society have been conditioned to have a hatred of guns, a phobia, an intense irrational fear of guns. People act irrationally about guns and the behavior is encouraged. You realize that in none of these events did anything bad happen, did any harm come to any individual. When the agent finds a gun or ammunition in a bag, he's found an inert, benign object. This is important; when you find drugs they are not inert; They are not benign

Agents wear rubber gloves when they're inspecting bags not because they might touch a gun but because they might touch a drug. Government agents have died because they touched a dusting of fentanyl. Drugs are active agents. But no gun ever hurt anybody by itself; it's the opposite of the drug. It can't hurt anybody by itself. 

If somebody had a box of ammo in his luggage and it broke open you would simply gather them up and stuff them back in the bag and nothing bad would happen. But if the same individual had a brick of fentanyl in his luggage and that broke open and got into the plane’s ventilation system it would kill everyone on the plane.

While the fentanyl scenario could happen you might think it's unlikely. So let me give you one that is likely and it's a direct comparison with the firearm because it's just as illegal. And that's the lithium battery.

Lithium batteries are similar to firearms in that either one may be taken on a commercial aircraft. Both are considered dangerous and have restrictions on how they may be transported. A firearm has to be inside a locked box, unloaded, separate from the ammunition and placed inside your checked luggage.

Your laptop computer with its lithium battery on the other hand must NOT be placed into your checked luggage. If you wish to travel with a firearm you must have a checked bag and if you wish to travel with a laptop or anything that contains a lithium battery then you must have a carry on.

I've never tried to get a firearm onto the airplane accidentally in my carry on bag but I have accidentally put my laptop in my checked bag. Oddly the agent merely had me take the laptop out of the checked bag and place it in my carry on. He didn't call the police he didn't take me aside for questioning he didn't fine me $10,000. He merely said “Sorry. But that has to go on your carry on” and allowed me to make the change.

If you don't think that's odd you should because there are around 6500 guns found in American luggage every year and nothing bad ever happens as a result of those guns but they do provide a nice revenue stream for the government from the fines that result. And that's just the guns accidentally packed into luggage that they caught. There are probably another 100 to 600 guns packed into luggage that TSA didn't find so those actually went on the plane, just like the Turks and Caicos tourist ammo. And still nothing bad happened.

The safety record for lithium batteries however isn't so good. Unlike guns, lithium batteries are inherently dangerous.  Deadly even, exploding and killing 22 people in a factory in Seoul on June 24th 2024.  You've all seen the videos of lithium battery fires on airplanes? Turns out there's about one a week according to the FBI. That’s a lot of fires.  So there's probably more than one prohibited gun per week going on to an airplane somewhere by accident, and absolutely nothing bad happens. But we're allowing lithium batteries to go on the airplane because they're just too important to our lives and that convenience is worth having one fire a week.  We panic over the harmless guns.  When it comes to guns,  firearm hysteria rules the world.

Drugs

If Turks and Caicos really wanted to solve its crime problem it should really attack drugs. What seems simpler to you? They are an island after all. How hard can it be to stop drugs from coming in? They're not a huge Trading Center. They're not importing ship loads of grain. If they can find two bullets in a suitcase then tracking down drugs should be child's play.

It's just the nature of the things. You buy a couple of bullets for self-defense and you might never use them, and never buy any more.  So there’s not that much traffic. On the other hand, a drug user has to have a constant supply. We're talking about two tiny bullets compared to bags of pills, bricks of powder, or bales of pot - the amounts are huge. And you can just get drug sniffing dogs to find them - you don't need to have a human X-ray every bag like you do with bullets.

More important though, strict drug laws actually work. Just look at Japan. Japan has low crime rates for a number of reasons. They too are an island with very strict gun laws just like Turks and Caicos but they don’t pretend to make their country safe by prosecuting foreigners with bullets.  Instead, Japan is strictly enforcing their drug laws and not against foreigners, but against their own citizens. 

All drug use is illegal in Japan. The main reason Japan is so safe is that Japan has zero tolerance for drug use among its citizens and among its visitors. But it's more strict on its citizens.  You may remember the days when people went on drug vacations traveling to places where drugs were legal. You could fly away and get high.   People still do it today, but not the Japanese.  Japanese citizens are prohibited from taking drugs not only in Japan but anywhere and if you return to Japan from vacation and are found to have been taking drugs you'll be in prison just as fast if you were taking them at home.  So Japan has no drugs, and without the drugs, the underlying crime goes away. 

Another island nation with strict gun and drug laws is Singapore. If Turks and Caicos really wants to beat their crime problem, if it doesn't simply want a tourism tax on Americans, then they should do what Singapore does. In Singapore also, gun ownership is illegal and so is drug use.  But they don’t have any gun crime because they are so strict on drugs, including the death penalty. Singapore has executed at least 16 people since March 2022 for drug related crime helping to make Singapore a very safe country by focusing on the root cause - drugs. Its minimum sentence for illegal gun possession is 5 years, compared to 12 in Turks and Caicos.   Seems TCI has the ratio backwards and Singapore is correctly attacking the root cause.  We showed Japan is stricter on its own citizens than on travelers, while Turks and Caicos concentrates on travelers with bullets as crime gets worse. 

Singapore like Turks and Caicos IS enforcing its laws against travelers but unlike Turks and Caicos it is focusing on the root cause of drug use. In Singapore the death penalty for drug possession can and has been carried out against foreigners.  In 2005 an Australian was arrested for carrying not two bullets, but 26,000 doses of heroin.   He was tried and hanged. He was not the first, nor is Singapore the only nation to execute foreigners for drug trafficking.  Neighboring Malaysia has executed three Australians for drug trafficking since 1993.  Singapore is safe while the Turks and Caicos Islands are engulfed in crime.

Drugs vs Guns

With the huge difference in the effects of firearms versus drugs in general and specifically in the events we've described here the hypocrisy in world opinion is appalling.

Again: people have gleefully pointed at the Americans who accidentally violated a technicality saying “serves them right, gun owners should take responsibility” even though the event not only DID not result in any crime but COULD NOT have resulted in any crime with no gun around.  And not only was no harm or illegal act intended, in fact no act of any kind involving the contraband was intended.

Compare that to the Australian drug trafficker. Singapore mandates the death penalty for 1000 doses and he was carrying 26 times that amount. The drugs he carried weren't deadweight. They did not accidentally find themselves in his luggage. They were in fact the entire reason for his trip. The drugs would not have been there without him and he would not have been there without the drugs.  Heroin in any dose is addictive and in some dose it's deadly. It's never benign and he was certainly the bearer of harm to at least some individual and he knew it. None of this is true of the innocent Americans caught in the Turks and Caicos ammo trap.

And yet that guilty man was the inspiration for extradition attempts, political pressure from Australia’s gun hating prime minister John Howard, a possible hearing in the World Court, a Moment of Silence in the Queensland Assembly, and the grand prize, a documentary by ABC news. 

Clearly there is no equal justice for gun owners.

Brittany Griner

This brings us to the case of Brittany Griner. Brittany Griner, an American, took Hash Oil, into Russia and was put into prison for several months as a result.  She was eventually freed by a prisoner swap for a Russian terrorist.  There are similarities and there are differences between Griner and the TCI cases.  

The differences are significant. First, Griner acted intentionally.  Even if the cannabis oil she brought in was not known to be illegal, it was not brought in accidentally. And Greiner had had ample opportunity to make sure that whatever she was carrying was compliant with Russian drug law, and that could have been resolved by a simple Google search. 

Greiner was not a casual visitor on vacation. Hers was not a one-time trip, or a trip to one of many different vacation spots over the years where you have to learn new laws and new customs each time. She was traveling to Russia for her work.  She had done so several times and she should not only have known the rules but - like the TSA guidelines say - have a separate bag just for traveling to Russia.  She could well afford to do so. Griner deserves little sympathy for her error, if it was an error.

But despite her own personal responsibility for what happened The US government put its full power behind efforts to have her released.  They exchanged her for an international arms dealer Viktor Bout.  He returned to Russia and is now a leading member of nationalist political party LDPR supporting Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. 

To summarize, the US government defended a deliberate act.  She imported drugs to use as drugs, was caught bringing them in, and was then freed by the full power of the US government.

The same government which is supposed to defend the Constitution.  The right to bear arms is a natural right.  It isn’t just our right, it’s a human right, but it is guaranteed by the US constitution and the government should aggressively defend any American whose rights are threatened.

Instead the government defended Britney Griner for vaping hash oil  -  not a basic human right.  In fact, hash oil is a Federal Level I controlled substance. Biden brought her home when she was breaking American law as well.

So the government is okay with innocent gun owners being prosecuted overseas for activities that are legal here, but will bust you out of jail for breaking drug laws which are illegal both here and also in the host country. I wonder what Biden would have done if Griner had been caught in Singapore.  

Conclusion

We’re not anti-drug anti-vaping anti-cannabis necessarily – that’s not the message here. We’re against assigning the blame to guns while crime gets worse.  If the strict gun laws were making TCI safer, I’d be quiet.  But they had just 4 murders in 2017,  and for 2024 they’d doubled that number by last March.  Americans are simultaneously the victims of TCI crime, while being blamed for it. Meanwhile the corrupt government rakes in the money from both ends, with the gun haters of the world cheering them on. It won’t get better, without attacking the root cause which is drugs.

Thank-you for your attention.