First guns turned in for amnesty

Twenty-four hours after the gun amnesty was launched…the first weapons are in. This afternoon a twelve-gauge shotgun and a thirty-eight special revolver were handed in to the office of Ombudsman Paul Rodriguez. And while critics of the programme are sceptical of its motives, Rodriguez says time will prove the naysayers wrong.

Paul Rodriguez, Ombudsman

“These were delivered this afternoon by members of the public. I won’t tell you who and that’s the deal right, that persons can come here and freely and confidentially give up weapons that they do not want to keep for any reason whatsoever. Perhaps they are not licensed and they don’t want to be caught with weapons, which will bring about a very stiff penalty after the amnesty period of thirty days. I want to say I attended the conference yesterday when the programme was introduced and one or two people were swearing that not one gun would be delivered and here, this is only the first day of the program and we have two guns in front of us. So I want to say to people, look, let’s not be so negative man.”

Patrick Jones

“Mr. Rodriguez, what will happen to these weapons now?”

Paul Rodriguez

“These weapons will be delivered right away to the police. We won’t keep any weapons here because of course we don’t want to suffer the misfortune of our office being broken into by people who would think we have guns here. We have no guns; we’ll keep no guns here. As soon as we get the guns we will deliver them up to the police.”

Rodriguez reminds the public that under the amnesty programme persons who turn in their weapons voluntarily will be under no obligation to offer any explanation or information to authorities. When the thirty day amnesty period is over authorities will pay for information on illegal weapons and promise to come down hard on those caught with illicit firearms.