De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge has en­dorsed con­tin­ued ef­forts to strength­en law en­force­ment part­ner­ships across the re­gion as he out­lined the threat posed by il­le­gal gun traf­fick­ing in the Caribbean.

Sturge made the re­marks dur­ing his fea­ture ad­dress at the launch of a work­shop on firearms traf­fick­ing, joint­ly fa­cil­i­tat­ed by Cari­com IM­PACS and the US De­part­ment of State's Bu­reau of In­ter­na­tion­al Nar­cotics and Law En­force­ment Af­fairs (INL) at the Court­yard Mar­riott Ho­tel, In­vaders' Bay, Port of Spain, on Mon­day morn­ing.

Sturge de­scribed the chal­lenge as a "firearms cri­sis," rather than a "prob­lem," not­ing that the scale of in­ter­ven­tion re­quired to ad­dress a cri­sis was more sig­nif­i­cant.