Finance Minister Colm Imbert said AR-15 semi-automatic rifles are “deadly” weapons and legislation is needed to ban them.

Yesterday, during the sitting of Parliament, Prime Minister Keith Rowley spoke of the need for legislative intervention to ban assault weapons.

In response, opposition MP Ravi Ratiram said assault weapons were already banned in T&T, and he cited a firearms expert.

Closing the budget debate, Imbert criticized Ratiram and the opposition on the issue. He said what was banned in Trinidad and Tobago was an automatic firearm.

He noted that under the Firearms Act, a “prohibited weapon” is defined as “any artillery or automatic firearm.”

The United States passed a law in 1994 called The Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which bans certain categories of weapons, he noted.

The definition of an assault weapon in the United States includes all specified semi-automatic rifles – all AK, UZI, Beretta and AR-15 series, he said.

Imbert pointed out that many of the weapons used by gangs and criminals in Trinidad and Tobago were not automatic weapons, as required by that country’s legislation.

He recalled a Time Magazine article dated May 2023, titled “How the AR-15 Rifle Became America’s Most Dangerous Weapon,” noting that an analysis showed mass shootings in the United States had were carried out using AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.

Imbert explained that Trinidad and Tobago’s legislation is very “narrow” and simply says that “automatic weapons” are prohibited.

“But the AR-15 is not an automatic weapon, it’s a semi-automatic rifle,” he said.

He said Caricom was not being “stupid” in working on legislation to address this problem, and neither was the United States.

“They recognized that semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 are deadly and should be banned and should not be in the hands of a civilian,” Imbert said.