I was wandering my Facebook feed the other day when I came across an old post from my Uncle in Nigeria complaining about increasing restrictions on his ownership of firearms in the country. As not a big fan of the state, he grew up as a war refugee during the Biafra Civil War, he could not help but come to the same conclusions that we in America have known since 1787. Governments love to disarm the citizenry because it must maintain a monopoly on force “for your own protection”.   Here was his post:
In response I spit some hot fire on Universality of his reaction:
“People everywhere look down on the gun crazy American culture but your summation is why there is a lawful guarantee that I can purchase a weapon, the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. While we can’t easily purchase automatic weapons, we can purchase and possess shotguns, rifles and handguns. People ask the question all the time why we in America feel the need to own such weapons of war? The answer, a cultural distrust of government and its ability to protect us from robbers and bandits. That has brought with it some consequences. We have lots of gun crime in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. We have reasonable restrictions on ownership that we are willing to accept but when those restrictions become onerous we in America get wary and suspicious.
The first principles of natural law, god’s law, is defense of yourself and what is yours (property, family, life). This has become something in our civilized world we have outsourced to others and it has put us at their mercy. Governments should never have a monopoly on the use of force, deadly or otherwise. Those herdsmen are only doing what comes naturally – defending what’s theirs. Why won’t the Police do anything? Â Fear of retaliation? Corruption? Â Who knows. Government officials enforcement is always arbitrary which is why they should never be given unlimited powers to “protect the people”. Â I wish I could take the weapons off your hands but you know …. international law and arm trafficking. God bless Uncle.”
True words then as they are now.