Common Sense

I tried to leave this as a comment to Fred’s Somali story, but could not so I will post it as a reply here.

Fred, I think you have hit this right on the head. When I read this my knee started to jerk immediatly.

I knew if we could just get those firearms out of the hands of those nomadic, warring tribesmen, who are now cooped up in cities without any kind of jobs or economy, we could get them started on their journey towards pacification.

An easy fix.

I put out of my mind the fact that in this population of almost 100% armed male adults, there was an amazingly low number of actual gun crimes. There were deaths dues to the ongoing war and tribal fueds, but no real murders or accidental shootings.

That being said, and just as quickly ignored, I am sure that just somehow consficatiing the hundreds of thousands of rifles, we can pacify and calm the population and get them involved in the real day to day function of world government and taxes.

They can trade in their rifles for landscaping equipment and garage door openers, chain link fences etc. And becoome productive, relaxed suburbanites.

However, just as my itchey fingers were about to close around the barrrels of those hundreds of thousands of evil firearms, I recalled similiar events which had occurred just a few years ago and on this same continent.

It seems that the inhabitants of Rawanda had decided to become embroiled in a genocidal civil war in which over 500,000 Rawandans had been killed.

And the most revealing thing about this was that the Rawandans had few to no firearms, but these enterprising Africans did not let this stop them.

It seems that almost every Rawandan had a machete, and were more than willing to use these machetes to kill their fellow tribesman. And in the cases where no machete was readily available, they used axes, shovels, hoes, pickaxes, kitchen knives, screwdrivers, chainsaws, burning tires, rocks etc.

And when none of these implements were available they were only too ready to use their bare hands to strangle or beat the victims to death.

Let me say that this easily dispells the myth of “lazy Africans” perpetuated by Belgian colonial forces. To kill 500,000 of your fellow countrymen in such a short time period, you need to work very hard every day. You have to keep on a schedule and treat this as a real job.

This certainly puts a new light on things. Now I have a slight worry that simply consficating firearms might not solve the problem, but I am sure I can easily just be persuaded to be in denial of that and continue on with this plan.

PS- The person narrating the YouTube video is supposed to be an ex Navy SEAL.

No problem there except when they come to one of the AK-stands, the character who has been following them picks up an empty RPG launcher and points it at the SEAL who quickly ducks out of the line of sight of the barrel (which you can see daylight through, thereby insuring it is indeed an empty RPG) and when the goober pointing the RPG sees this he get tickled and points it at the cameraman who also tries to hide and cower from the empty launcher. Ducking and shrinking in fear.

This produces even more attempts by the goober at scaring the crew. Soon, even the crowd begins to laugh and point at the silly scared Americans.

You see, even the backwards, uneducated Somalians know when an RPG launcher is empty and presents no threat to anyone. Even the women and children know this, everyone knows this, except the scared AMericans.

So it is with no surprise that soon the crowd begins to think they should perhaps capture and beat these silly people. Why should they have any respect for anyone who ducks and shows fear when someone points an empty launcher at them? That would be no different than someone getting scared at a plain wooden stick being pointed at them, and even I would have to lose some respect for someone who ducked down and cowered when I pointed a stick at them.

I think I might have played it differently, especially if I had been a Navy SEAL,( I was only a RANGER) I think I might have picked up an AK from the stand and with a big friendly grin on my face, racked the bolt and pointed it at his head and waited to see if he would duck.

When he did, I would have laughed and pointed to him and the crowd would have started laughing at him too. Then, I would have swept the crowd with the AK that had the racked bolt, safety off, and seen if they would duck too. Then laughed and pointed at them.

The point being, when in Africa, a continent filled with predators, try not to look like prey.