Boko Haram: A Case For The Right To Bear Arms By Adult Nigerians

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The cat with nine lives? Boko Haram current leader, Abubakar Shekau. There have been claims that he was killed by security forces but continues to surface in video and audio recordings issued by the terror group.
The cat with nine lives? Boko Haram current leader, Abubakar Shekau. There have been claims that he was killed by security forces but continues to surface in video and audio recordings issued by the terror group.

By Sam Asowata
Hold it! I must oppose your opposition to my proposition that terrified, crouching and cringing Nigerians be saved by an Act of the National Assembly freeing and empowering them to bear arms. That is to say, buy and carry personal guns!
I abort your opposition to my proposition because of your omission to oppose a deadly but lucrative reality.
You want to oppose the idea of individual Nigerians owning guns because they will use them to kill others.
But, have you canvassed for a ban on the manufacture and sale of vehicles because they are indisputable Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) via their endless and increasing accidents?
A single aircraft crashing to the earth, or onto a rocky mountain, or into the bottomless sea, gobbles, sometimes, two hundred lives in less than a minute. But have you, my opponent, ever called for a cessation to the making, buying of, and flying in the huge metallic birds? No! You have not!
In Nigeria, in both cases, government created the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), for land travels, and the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) for the air sector, since the air cannot accommodate human traffic wardens, only spirits.
Yet, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of lives consumed by these means of transportation, faster and more glamorous and, logically, deadlier vehicles, planes, ships and bullet trains are being built. And they are gleefully bought and hailed as the ‘Wonders of Technology’.

Then comes the killing industry, which you call ARMS MANUFACTURING.
It is one of the world’s most lucrative, knowing no distress, downturn or abolition campaign but only fanatical patronage. Indeed, “defence” eats more of nations’ budgets than healthcare, education, transportation and merry-making. I will not cite figures, because I am only proving governments’ lip service to providing “security” for sitting duck citizens crouching, cringing and quaking in terror behind their maximum security prisons called homes all because of some dastards tote deadly arms of terror.
High fences. Massive, high-to-hell steel gates. Barbed wire. Burglary proof. Close Circuit Television Cameras. Electrified fence. Security Guards. Alsatian dogs. Suspect your neighbour…..all these and more, yet INSECURITY STALKS the Nigerian.
It is not just the BOKO HARAM terrorists, now promoted to the rank of “insurgents” who, the government says, would be “crushed in December” of 2015, but are now “technically defeated” and are still being “degraded”, even in February of 2016.
There are armed robbers. There are kidnappers. There are hired assassins. There are murderous political thugs…
Should the law-abiding citizen pray and wait for all these killers to have mercy, and spare his or her precious life?
Or should each citizen hire Security Guards, or Bodyguards? OK! Did numerous Bodyguards effectively ‘guard’ Mr Bola Ige, Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, on that day of death in December 2001? He was killed right inside his bedroom, like the Lagos politician, Mr Funso Williams, and like the World Bank official, and governorship aspirant in Ekiti State, Mr Ayodeji Daramola. Or like the South-South politicians, Mr Harry Marshal and Mr Aminoasari Dikibo. Or like the great Journalist, Mr Dele Giwa, in 1986, or Mr Godwin Agbroko, Chairman, Editorial Board, THISDAY, or like Bayo Ohu of The Guardian…
They were all killed and, as Mr Impunity boasts in Nigeria, “Nothing will happen if I kill you now! I will kill you and nothing will happen”! Yes, they died for nothing, and nothing happened, or will ever happen. Just as the thousands of victims of the BOKO HARAM attacks are dying like flies, like excess citizens, like obesity trying to shed weight…It is…This is Nigeria, where do you think you are?
But, if ONLY Nigerians had GUNS!
Safety, or security is in the hands and barrel and trigger of a personal gun!
It is not up, astride a high fence, or suspended by the spikes on the cold, steel gates….It is not in the white canines and lolling tongue of an indulged dog… No Security or Bodyguard can provide safety or security, either. They are mortal, vulnerable and not one hundred per cent reliable.
Personal gun is it! You have! I have! Mutual respect, or Mutual Destruction. Real equality before the law that entrenches it: THE RIGHT TO OWN A PERSONAL GUN!

This is one reason the United States of America is so solid, knowing no dictator in its more than 230 years history…
The SECOND AMENDMENT of its Constitution says “….THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE ABRIDGED…”!
And should you retort by pointing at the corpses of the FREE GUNS, I will point at the corpses incurred by your posh, glittering and costly vehicles… And at the corpses of a plane crash…and at the corpses of a single train that derails…
Yet, you have not set off a campaign to discontinue with manufacturing them.
So, please, gimme a rattling gun… And WRAP IT IN A BRAND NEW LAW, please.

Asowata, a journalist, sent in this piece from Abuja, Nigeria


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