Dear Sir,

Your editorial of June 1 is a watershed in local media. Your opinion piece gives voice to the ignorance and superficial analysis that plagues almost every aspect of life in Bermuda. At no stage in your discourse do you ever descend into the “how and why” or possible solutions to the longstanding issues that have given rise to gun violence, the prevalence of gangs and the 28 deaths you cite.

Instead, you further denigrate an already targeted and demonised demographic by calling them “evil”, “the enemy from within” and “a cancer”. You even seek to deprive the black community of its grief and angst around these issues by suggesting that this is “eating away” at “our community” and not just the black community. Has one white person, expatriate, business person or Portuguese person been shot, convicted of shooting or alleged to be a member of a gang? No sir; they are all black.

You refer to a mindset of young men to use guns with fatal intent, but at no stage pose the question, “What has made them think this is acceptable?” These young men have grown up on the fringes of the illusion of paradise that many Bermudians claim we are. They are the children, ironically, also covered in today’s edition (June 2), who are going to school without breakfast and lunch, angry at being without in a society that has so much, but not enough for them.

To suggest that the People’s Campaign and the unions bear some responsibility for this state of affairs bares your political bias more than any reasonable effort at challenging sectors of the community. Like most who analyse these issues from the insulation afforded a spectator, useless phrases such as “take a stand” and “come together” are trotted out to masquerade as a call to action.

Interestingly, you draw a comparison with the Pathways to Status protest and question why it should draw such attention while shooting deaths do not. For your information, sir, that was a protest against gun violence because that protest sought to stop the very policies that have created a marginalised group in this society who are always made to be second, behind the needs of business and others, and who therefore have created their own community in which they can be heard and respected. The two are inextricably linked.

Enough of trying to explain to you the pain of the people you so cruelly label and criticise. The views of the RG are made plain in a shocking and unbelievably offensive reference to March’s protest as “marches that discoloured our most famous street”. That, sir, could have been lifted from an editorial in the 1850s or, regrettably, even the 1950s.

We now know what is thought of us; a watershed moment in local media. That which we suspected is now confirmed: our cries for justice and equity simply ruin the veneer that is your Bermuda and have no place on Front Street ... in 2016. Imagine that.

A.S. SIMONS, Paget