Michael Weeks, the Shadow Minister for Sport, believes “drastic action” must be taken to rid the Island of gun crime in the wake of last week’s shooting incidents outside the National Sports Centre and Somerset Cricket Club.

Weeks, who is also the vice president of Western Stars Sports Club, was one of several politicians who attended the Bermuda Football Association’s Special Congress Meeting at Devonshire Recreation Club on Sunday in an effort to tackle the escalating gang violence.

Three shots were fired outside the National Sports Centre after the Dudley Eve Trophy final between Dandy Town Hornets and Somerset Trojans on Remembrance Tuesday, with four men then shot outside Somerset Cricket Club a few hours later, leading the BFA to scrap last weekend’s matches on the advice of the police.

Weeks stressed that anti-social behaviour was not a football issue but a community one and believes there needs to be “outside-the-box” thinking in a bid to eradicate the problem.

“What I heard in the meeting was very interesting and we are all concerned about what is happening, but we have to be mindful that it is not just a sporting club issue, it’s a community issue,” Weeks said. “It goes beyond politics. If we don’t come together as a community and take ownership of it, then we will find ourselves having the same conversation five years from now.

“We have to look at this and decide whether or not we’re going to stamp it out.

“The only way to stamp it out is to have a real conversation.

“This is not a white problem, white kids are not involved in this, it is our young black men. To get on top of this we have to be drastic, we can’t stay inside the box.

“It can be fixed because we’re still a community and if we are a community, then we have to name and shame in order to save this country for our children and grandchildren.”

Gun violence also forced the end-of-season Twenty20 cricket final to be cancelled in September after a car carrying players from a game in St David’s was chased and shot at in Southampton.

“We have to stress that it is not a football and cricket problem, but a community problem that has spilled over into football and cricket,” Weeks said.

“We can’t keep dancing around the issues and we have to talk about three stages: how do we address our youth so that they won’t get involved in this; how do we deal with the issue now and how do we deal with it going forward?”

Weeks’s own club, Western Stars, the home of Dandy Town, was the scene of a shooting in April, 2010, when a man and a 17-year-old girl were both injured after being hit by bullets.

“This drive-by shooting that happened on Tuesday was not the first; four years ago it happened at Dandy Town when two people got shot and one of them was only a school kid,” Weeks said.

“What we tend to do as a community is get excited for 15 or 20 minutes and then we forget.

“While the shooting happened at Somerset, it is not a Somerset problem, this is an affiliate problem. When it happened at Western Stars a few years ago it wasn’t a Dandy Town problem, but some people make you feel that way.”

n Tonight’s rescheduled FA Cup preliminary matches pit Young Men’s Social Club against Tuff Dogs at Devonshire Recreation Club at 8pm, with BAA Wanderers playing B&V United at Goose Gosling Field at 7pm.