I run an anti-gun and knife campaign in Bristol and wanted to see if the slave trade and young people’s involvement with gun and knife crime are linked in anyway.
I have looked at the Willy Lynch letter which was believed to be written in 1712, and by reflecting on my own personal experiences that I have faced with young people who have
been involved in gun and knife crime but who want to turn their lives around.
After reading the Willy Lynch letter I was shocked with what he said. It really made me think and I after you read it, it will make you think as well not just about what happened then but what is happening today with our young people.
I also read a speech from the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan telling his followers that they will be going back to their day jobs because of what we are doing to each other as black on black crime.
The Ku Klux Klan’s statements suggest,
“Blacks are doing a better job getting rid of themselves than we ever did,
‘They shoot each other constantly, they spend a huge amounts of money on cars, liquor, that stuff they call bling bling, and the proliferation of rap music — as they talk about all that in their magazines — Blacks had become their own worst enemy.”
Willy Lynch also proposes that to control Blacks you have to set them against each other.
Alexander Rose is 20 years old and at the age of 16 started the STOP campaign.
This is an anti gun and knife campaign which he decided to set up after a close friend of his was murdered in South London. I put my question to him.
“When you first asked me the question if gun and knife crime has any relation to the slave trade I said ‘No’. then when I read the information that you sent me the ‘Willy Lynch Letter’ and ‘Leave It To The Blacks’, I never changed my mind but I did understand why some people may feel that it may have some relation to slave trade. The thing is I don’t know a lot about the history of the slave trade.
The Willy Lynch letter is deep and when you read it you start to understand why we are the way that we are and the reason we are as we are is because we refuse to learn how to
communicate with each other. If we cannot communicate with each other all we know how to do is kill each other. Now this is not the same for all young people but there is a small percentage that this applies to”
Is there a difference between girls and boys?
“There should not be a difference be a difference between boys and girls but girls have to talk about their problems and would rather argue with each other than hurt each other,
whereas boys if they have an argument they want you dead. But this is all changing as one of my team members is Bristol will be looking at the rising issue that is girl gangs.
If we look back we do see that girls do empower each other and this goes back to their mentality girls are more open to talking about their problems with their peers where boys would rather just deal with the problem on their own, when girls talk about their problems with their peers they go out of their way to help each other so in answer to your question ‘Do girls empower each other?’, Yes they do. Do boys feel dis-empowered? Well as a male myself yes sometimes I do. Nowadays girls are very career focused they don’t want to be the stay at home mother or the housewife since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minster of this country. Females want their 30 grand jobs, they have started to become independent so the male starts to feel dis empowered”
While Alexander Rose was less convinced, I personally believe that the reason why young people are killing of young people is related to the slave trade and this goes back to before 1440’s where Africans would sell other Africans into slavery for weapons and beads and sell rubbish to each other. This is how Bristol got rich trough the slave trade.
From my personal experiences I agree with Alexander that young people act the way that they do from a mentality that has not learnt how to communicate with each other. So when you don’t know how to communicate with each other all you know how to kill each other. This is where the problem is. We need to teach our young people how to communicate with each other. So what I am doing as a anti-gun and knife campaigner is going into schools, youth centres and colleges also youth prisons and talk to young people about what they do and why they do the things that they do. And try and work out their problems with them and work out a ways where they can learn to communicate with each other and engage them into positive activities.
With the recent passing of my family friend being murdered I am so angry. Why is it that someone had to kill him, to even pick up a knife and walk out your house with it and then get so mad that you used it on a 17 year old.
Recent statistics say the gun and knife crime is down 20% but I cannot believe that this is true for the simple fact that not all crime is reported. If someone is stabbed and it is not serious enough for them to go to hospital they will stay at home and deal with it and it will never get reported. So I feel that gun and knife crime is not going down at all. Maybe reported crime is going down but overall it is not going down.
I also feel that the media has a huge part to play on this especially the US Hip Hop music scene where so many songs degrade women, talk about how many times they have been shot or knifed up, have all these flash cars in their music videos and show how much money they have. Young people get influenced by this and then when you ask them why they carry a knife they say that is a form of protection in case anyone comes up and to them and tries to rob them. They say that they would stab them. What they don’t know is that statistics show if you try and use a knife on someone else, there is a high chance your own knife will get used on you.