By Elempe Dele
Today, in Nigeria, there are some elements that do not subscribe to the entity; they are laws onto themselves. They have a boundariless Quasi State within this country and their activities are basically illegal. These individuals and groups fall into different categories: terrorists, bandits, armed robbers, kidnappers…their activities have been busy trying to make Nigeria one of the most dangerous place in the world to live. I will not want to go into the known fact of how the tribilistic tendencies of General Buhari helped fuel this anomie, nor his broken-egg approach towards security without any single evidence of hope for the past 5 years.
“I am internalizing the issue of insecurity concerning the huge debate to whether gun possession and acquisition should be made legal (though with rigorous profiling to help control it’s proliferation) I think now is the time to push for the idea of citizens having the rights and opportunities to acquire guns because of the level of insecurity that has become a pall around the country. Of course there are debates as to whether these guns won’t be proliferated or get into wrong hands. Yes, this concern cannot be discounted totally, however, the need for citizens to own guns now outweighs the fear of the aftermath of this ownership.”
The average Nigerian citizen who is law abiding and that cannot afford personal police protection is at the mercies of bandits, armed robbers, kidnappers and terrorists. Our highways are now chessboards for kidnappers and roadmaps to untimely deaths. The citizens look helplessly and defenceless as these opportunists hold their lives hostage. It is now a miracle in Nigeria to travel and get to destination…some even go as far as celebrating journey mercies with church thanksgiving.
My argument for gun possession is that if we are mostly in possession of legal guns, we won’t be totally rendered defenceless during these spades of attacks that has characterized the Nigerian state. Imagine in a bus while traveling, 3-7 citizens in the vehicle have their guns with them, in your neighborhood, virtually everyone has, in villages where these terrorists and bandits operate, the villagers have the kinds of guns the assiliants have, or famers have enough modern guns to wade of these Fulani killers, kidnappers and rapists…I think the security situation will be a story with different dimension. It is unthinkable that those criminals who possess these illegal guns use them against the law abiding citizens without any form of resistance. In the West were possession of gun is legal, you can’t just go to compromise someone’s house in a bid to rob him without getting shot. So this has helped in checking robbery incidents to a large extent.
In some instances where we use vigilante groups to complement the police, they are issued mostly Dane guns as against AK47 that these criminals have. It’s like fighting a man with a gun using a cudgel.
Until we take a serious relationship look at the issuance of sophisticated guns for the personal protection of the citizens, the issue of insecurity in Nigeria will be part of our sorry story for a long while.
