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.
