“What's happened is very sad. My condolences to the family. Something's got to be done about the young people. I don't know what's going on. It's affecting the community also. Right now, we've got people in fear.”

That quote could have been offered yesterday. It wasn't, but more on that later. When it comes as no surprise that a fatal shooting has occurred on your doorstep, the instinct is to perhaps consider a change of scenery. However, Southampton Rangers Sports Club and its surrounding community do not have that option — they are stuck with each other. Therein lies the rub.

Prince Edness spent his final hours at the same club before he was pursued and killed a stone's throw away. And, now, less than 11 months later while on the premises of the same club, another man has had his life cut short by a murderer's bullet.

The kneejerk reaction by the authorities was to suspend weekend sporting activity at the grounds, and at other venues in the western parishes where the police believe further violence might have followed. But that is merely applying a Band-Aid to a sore long after it has spread so infectiously that Bermuda has become pockmarked. A leper colony in the crudest sense.

Places to go, places not to go; refugees in our own home.

Seven days ago, this space was reserved for a celebration of all that Bermuda can be, as the America's Cup came to town to spectacular effect. The reality now, though, is that much of what we are is not pretty. Not pretty at all.

Southampton Rangers and the people who run the club have some serious decisions to make — or else decisions may be taken out of their hands. Like it or not, the club has become a lightning rod for antisocial behaviour. Most of the troublemakers are not members, but because “their money is good”, they have been accepted through the doors and have stuck like the most foul of stenches.

The consistency of major incidents happening there, or very close in the vicinity, is much more than coincidental and it is truly surprising that the Bermuda Police Service have not reacted. Without a liquor licence, many of the club's hooligan and gang-related problems would go away overnight. But to strip an organisation of its liquor licence, or even to suspend it, is effectively to take away its lifeblood. Such a decision cannot be taken lightly, but those in authority have to be getting a bit antsy.

Cue Attorney-General Trevor Moniz, the Minister of Legal Affairs. And cue Juan Wolffe, the senior magistrate and chairman of the licensing authority for the western district.

As is often the case, the many suffer for the acts of the few, and there are many respected, hard-working and law-abiding Bermuda citizens who frequent Southampton Rangers Sports Club. Like any workmen's club, it is a place to get away from it all. And if there is a sporting event going on at the same time, that's a bonus.

In the case of this club, in particular, it is home to the best cricket team on the Island, having swept all aside in capturing the domestic league title this summer. Saturday's Bermuda Cricket Board end-of-season awards night reflected their relative excellence. We say “relative” because we know what a sad state the national game is in at present. Then there are the youth programmes.

The good names that are part of the club's heritage are many — the Raynors, the Tuckers, the Joneses, the Wainwrights, the Brangmans. And so on and so on. Good, proud people. Many of their feats are the stuff of legend and, in Janeiro Tucker, they boast a genuine, modern-day star who at his best could comfortably hold his own in most national cricket teams below Test level.

However, much of the good that has been achieved at Southampton Rangers comes these days attached with a spectre lingering in the background. They are never too far away from something being about to kick off. Machete attacks on the premises after football matches; brawls on the premises during cricket matches — this year involving a cricket team leaving the field to do so; a fatal shooting involving people seen at the club minutes before, in the case of the Edness murder; a fatal shooting on club premises, in the case of Friday just gone. It is becoming too much for drastic action not to be taken.

The Bermuda Football Association, in announcing on its website that five matches in the western parishes were postponed yesterday as a result of the murder, described the incident as “unfortunate”. Really?

It is unfortunate when you accidentally drop your house keys down a roadside drain or cycle over a pothole on a dimly lit lane. That's unfortunate. It is not unfortunate when a country this size has to mourn yet another loss of life more than ten years after the gun and gang culture first reared its head.

Southampton Rangers, and those for whom the club lies close to their heart, needs to take a stand. Not the stand that Gerri Saltus, the president, took last December when he feigned ignorance in saying that the club had nothing to do with the Edness shooting, only for the murder trial to reveal otherwise. But a stand in putting its foot down to rid itself of the cancerous growth that is giving it a terribly bad name. Once and for all.

Fail to do that, fail to be brave while relying on law enforcement to back you up, and there is no point in existing, really.

They might as well shut the doors and embrace extinction because that is where they, and every other club that turns a blind eye as a hostage to profit, are headed.

The legacy of Eldon Raynor, honoured by the BCB as a one-club man on Saturday, deserves better. So, too, that of his esteemed relatives, Lloyd, Sheridan and Lee. And the Tuckers, and the Joneses, and the Wainwrights, and the Brangmans.

Oh, the quote to start this editorial? That was from a community leader in 2007 after the murder of Aquil Richardson, who was shot as he sat on a wall in the nearby Camp Hill area.

The speaker was then the president of Southampton Rangers Sports Club.

Former Somerset Cup Match captain.

Former Bermuda captain.

John Tucker.