This newspaper has not always agreed with everything that Bermuda Industrial Union executive vice president and PHC Club president Chris Furbert has done over the years, but he was right to remove the banners “honouring” the late Elroy Rupert Archibald from the walls of his club in Warwick.

The banners, especially the one that featured a handgun, were in the worst possible taste and show that Bermuda has its priorities entirely mixed up.

Mr. Archibald may have been liked and respected by his friends in the area, but the fact remains that he was a convicted armed robber who was part of the gang who broke into Hayward’s Grocery and murdered owner Roger Redman — a man known to give food to single mothers — and severely wounded Barnaby Trott, who had Down’s Syndrome and was employed by the shop.

After his release from prison, having served two thirds of a 15 year sentence for his part in that brutal crime, Mr. Archibald took part in the armed robbery of the Bank of Bermuda’s Somerset branch and was said to have fired a gun into the ceiling in the course of that robbery. For the family and friends of the late Mr. Redman, and for the other victims of that robbery and the Somerset bank robbery, Mr. Archibald will not be remembered as a general, or as a “sweet person”. He will be remembered as a cowardly man who terrified the victims of his crimes and believed in the power of the gun.

More broadly, these banners, and the “gun alley” banners displayed in Somerset recently, suggest that something is terribly wrong.

When people place the power of the gun above the force of law, it means that the society in which they live is descending from civilisation into anarchy. It may well be that people feel powerless and it may also be that they can only feel good about themselves by glorifying violence and “gangstas”. To be sure, the young will often identify with rebels and outcasts as they struggle to find their place in the world.

But that struggle should not cause pain to the innocent victims of brutal crimes, and there are better role models, both here and abroad, than Mr. Archibald was, in life or death.