“Imagine what Africa would look like without the existence of guns and other weapons: it would mean the end of rebellions, resistance movements and any other names that armed groups use to legitimise their use of guns. Instead of taking up arms, people would fight against poverty, lack of education and disease and we could actually end the current state of underdevelopment that still persists in many parts of the continent.” – Opinion: AU goal of silencing guns by 2020 ‘unrealistic’ [via dw.com]

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105 COMMENTS

  1. Yup, all those that lust for power and other men’s goods would turn into angels if it weren’t for guns. I can see it too, my brother.

    • Right, right. I did hear that line from the antis and the hoplophobes dozens of times. “It’s all because of the guns and we sold them to them”. Every time I hear or read it, blood still boils in my veins. What a load of utter crap.

      It’s in the HUMANS. THOSE humans. They are set back still 500 years, at least. Their lust for power, money, “haves”, riches is and will be endless. It’s not going to stop. You remove the guns, they will use the machetes. You remove the machetes, they’ll use their hands to kill each other – including women and children.

      It’s not going to change either. Their land does not have and has never had resources to grow away from that perennial state of things.
      In short: they are fucked up and they are fucked up because of their own condition.
      I’ve had enough of having to be blamed for a bunch of lefties lies and ‘fake news’.

      • I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, obviously it’s the people not the guns.

        But the other thing this quote gets wrong is that actually things HAVE been improving in Africa. Poverty and disease have actually gone downhill radically in Africa in the last 20 years, mostly thanks to somewhat better rule of law, technology, and capitalism. But people don’t get that from the news.

        • And also, because men with guns have used them to get rid of at least some Dictators from the back-when-guns-were-harder-to-come-by era.

          In general, the more guns resistance movements have, the better. While the black dudes in that picture may not necessary have won the jackpot wrt where they were born, those rifles in their hands still make them infinitely better off than their distant relatives, in that peaceful, gun free and resistance movement free nirvana of the Antebellum South. As long as governments have guns, citizens will always need them, in order to ensure who is serving who is not turned upside down by the old scourge of asymmetry of armament.

      • The resources are mined by the multinational corporations. The officials get rich. The citizens get no investment in roads schools education. No one wants to be poor. Wanting to work and take care of your family is a Conservative value held by 99% of people. It isn’t “those humans” because the same thing has happened in the US to poor and lower income whites. The corporations send their jobs off shore reap huge profits and leave you, me, us, with decaying towns.

        Same humans unless you believe there is a difference between a West Va coal miner and an African cadmium miner. If it’s color, then keep watching as the corporations go to the bank. They distracted you again.

        • Yet somehow, the US did not require government grants for schools, roads, and housing to thrive. Quite the opposite, in fact.

        • barnbwt: What? Most schools and roads were INDEED paid for with taxes, and there is still to this day a tax subsidy for home mortgages.

  2. In the meantime, one of the worst genocides in the continent’s history in Rwanda, was carried out largely with machetes.

    • They said without other weapons too. But I would like to know how they could have a world without weapons when anything can be used as one…. A world without weapons is a world without mal intent, in other words, a utopia.

      • No weapon is ever obsolete. Just ask anyone who has had their head bashed in with a rock or a club. Oh, right – you probably CAN’T ask them because they’re DEAD! Heck, the Palestinians are still using slings, a la David vs Goliath, to throw rocks and Molotovs at IDF troops, last I knew…or they were, before the wall went up.

    • Yep. And it was when the Tutsi minority got their hands on modern implements of war and built a rebel militia and fought the majority Hutu government sponsored genocide, mainly by machete, and brought the mass murder to a stop.

      Without that advantage of modern weapons of war, the killing would not have stopped until they were all dead.

  3. Weren’t a lot of the worst bits of violence, like the Rwanda genocide mostly committed with farm implements?

    If it weren’t for shovels and machetes, Africans would settle down to fighting poverty!

    • In the Great Patriotic War (WW II to us) the Russian solders who managed to survive the slaughter of frontal assaults on MG-34s and MG-42s and make it into the German trenches made good use of the bayonets on their Mosins, it being incredibly difficult to stripper-clip reload your 5 shot rifle while several angry people are trying to kill you. In trench fighting one of their favorite weapons was there entrenching tool with sharpened edges that they would wield with deadly efficiency.

      Yeah, I’m pretty sure that if we magically removed all the guns from Africa it would turn into Heaven on Earth and maybe we could convince all those people illegally entering the U.S. that finding a way to Africa would be a better choice.

      • In trench fighting one of their favorite weapons was there entrenching tool with sharpened edges that they would wield with deadly efficiency.

        It’s for reasons like this that I like to point out that anybody who thinks a telescoping stock makes a rifle more dangerous has never been on the receiving end of a hunk of solid walnut, wielded by someone who knows how.

    • “If it weren’t for shovels and machetes, Africans would settle down to fighting poverty”

      So that they could afford firearms, with which they would kill each other for power and money. Rocket science 101?

    • You seem to be getting carried away, using the word, “thinking”. There was no thought put into that quote. Just hopes, dreams, and unicorn farts.

  5. Just another example of liberals longing for their imaginary “happy place”, where unicorns fart rainbows and stardust and nobody is mean to anyone else and it’s a happy, communistic society where nobody has more than they need or works any harder than they are able to and everyone can sit around the environmentally friendly heating/cooking device (since campfires pollute and kill trees, dontcha know), singing “Koom-bai-yah” in the evening when the work is done.

    In other words, a typically leftist dose of unhealthy mental escapism from how the REAL world works, for good or bad.

  6. Africa’s problems are largely the result of a sudden end to colonial rule without preparing the general populace for participation in democracy and creating the new nations along the borders of the old colonial nations instead of creating new borders based on traditional tribal boundaries. Breeding like cockroaches doesn’t help matters, either.
    Africa is a FUBAR that can never be fixed, weapons or no weapons.

    • When the rest of the world stops supporting them with medical care, food and guns, leaves them on their own, their problems will come to a halt in less than 10 years. Tens or hundreds of millions will die, from starvation, disease and murder, mind you, but the problems you describe will be over.

    • “Africa’s problems are largely the result of a sudden end to colonial rule without preparing the general populace for participation in democracy…”

      Oh, please.

      Spare me. *Just* SPARE ME.

      The Bush Afghanistan / Iraq wars were a powerful learning experience for me. I naively believed if we could just give them the chance for a democracy they would take it.

      You *CANNOT* hand freedom to someone or a people.

      *They* have to want it. Want it badly enough to die for it, because that’s the price of it…

      • You also cannot civilize people whose culture and/or religious belief system disinclines them to be civilized. When you have people who have been carrying on intertribal warfare for centuries, only now they’re using AK-47’s and grenades in addition to spears and machetes, and you have people who believe that all the world must submit before the sword of mohammed (intentionally left lower case, as he is due absolutely zero respect), you do not have a basis for civilization or the benefits thereof. Better to just let them kill each other off.

      • Actually it is possible to prepare a people for democracy — it just takes more than any one administration has to work with; historically, it takes three to five generations, a time that could probably be cut to two or three generations if it was done intentionally rather than accidentally.

        It can’t be done directly, and that was the big problem with Iraq. Looking at the British Isles experience, it has to go from tribalism to a form of feudalism to a Magna Carta and then to extending sovereignty to the people. It also requires a significant level of literacy and a vibrant entrepreneurial middle class (not dominated by giant corporations); it was the “nation of shopkeepers” that drove Great Britain into reasonably democracy, i.e. a populace largely not dependent on either landowners or employers for their economic independence.

        So the best thing for improvement would be to foster a multitude of small businesses while keeping out large corporations and teaching tribal and other leaders the necessity and benefit of power-sharing. A political structure with a “house of lords” would have been the best first step for Iraq, and anywhere else where tribalism still reigns.

        But trying to leap from tribalism straight to representative democracy is merely an invitation to corruption and manipulated democracy (something the U.S. is achieving but only after two centuries of a reasonably respectable Republic), and thus into an appearance of democracy with a substance of neo-feudalism, i.e. tyranny.

    • “Machetes.”

      Old truck tires soaked in kerosene pushed down over the shoulders and lit on fire.

      AKA ‘Necklacing’…

      • AKA *Mandela* Necklacing –let’s not whitewash his Maoist legacy, which is about to culminate in the redistribution of white property to blacks in SA as was done in Zimbabwe. If only Nelson could have lived to see his final triumph.

        “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country” –Winnie Mandela

  8. People Morons have this notion that guns cause evil, that all these warlords and child soldiers would join a drum circle and sing kumbaya if their guns simply melted in their hands. The only slightly positive thing that would happen in that instance is that there would be no more child soldiers. I say slightly because instead of soldiers they would go back to being the perpetual victims third world children usually become due to their inherent uselessness in combat. Guns do not cause violence. They do not even facilitate it. What guns do is remove the monopoly of violence held by the physically superior and mentally sociopathic since the dawn of humanity. They allow women and children to fight on roughly equal ground with strong, angry young men. Take guns away and you will have more victims, not fewer.

    • Actually I think they would be screaming as their hands burned if the guns melted in them. Just saying.

    • Yesterday, a group of Nigerian military AND armed civilians defeated a Boko Haram attack on a truck stop. That’s a pretty good testament, I think, for the value of an armed society. Liberals always fantasize about eliminating guns and, at some point, begin accepting the kind of authoritarian government actions that would be necessary to make that happen. But, as rigidly gun-controlled countries have discovered, while it’s relatively easy to confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens it quite another matter to keep criminals from acquiring guns. Gun control laws create a smuggler’s paradise. If it’s as easy to buy an AK in, say, France or Australia as it is to buy drugs then the progessive/liberal/left fantasy of a gun-free society is just that—a fantasy that will accomplish nothing more than get more innocent people killed.

  9. Oh yeah, I guess then that the Rwanda massacre, which achieved the highest rate of human slaughter in history, wasn’t carried out primarily with MACHETES, you blithering idiots. GROW UP.
    Noun: Liberal Psychosis. Definition: Blaming HUMAN BEHAVIOR on INANIMATE OBJECTS.

  11. Tribal factions in africa have been warring for thousands of years. While the tools of war change (guns, edged weapons, spears, blunt objects, and sexual assaults) the roots of war have nothing to do with the tools.

  12. We are the reason Africa is overpopulated. Instead of killing off the losing tribe, they were sold to the Arabs as slaves – thier desendants are the lucky ones. We sent missionaries in, doctors, we made cures for many of the sicknesses they had, we brought antibiotics and did nothing to fix the population explosion. The West cries about the dwindling population of large animals, and then tries to take the blame.

    Experiments with overpopulated rats shows mammal nature and it is bloody. We see it in action every day in the papers, but are blind to it. Death, Famine, War, and Conquest are the four horsemen and when we slow them down, Chaos starts – or the Apocalypse.

    • On the other hand, we caused the world-wide ban of DDT which has resulted in the otherwise preventable deaths of millions from malaria.

    • Who is “we”?

      Are you a 1/2 percenter or can you trace your lineage to the founding fathers? When did your people arrive here? 1900?

      Read your history. You might be the downtrodden of Europe. Serfs. Used and abused by the upper class for centuries. Participant in major clan warfare for thousands of years.

      Don’t agree? Read up and see.
      History is right there.

      The Scotch/Irish were run out of Boston in 1730. Immigration issues aren’t new.

      • Every culture and ethnicity has held slaves at one time or another.
        Every culture and ethnicity has been enslaved at one time or another.

        But if you’re a white male, it’s all your fault.

        • The last unprotected class. Now that everyone else is protected, we are the new minority. Well then, I want special treatment too. It’ll be tough for the nannie state to comprehend or follow. Here it is, it’s a duesie…

          I want to be left alone. By the SJWs, by the religious minded, by the fed, by anyone that thinks I can’t make it without their “help” and advice. Just leave me the eff alone.

  13. I gather the author is a 6 year old girl who penned this piece with several colors of crayons.
    Everyone should just get Care Bear tattoos on our chests and in the face of aggression or assault simply disrobe.

  14. And just substitute Chicongo for Africa any weekend of the year. Especially the comment about over feeding and over breeding caused by western liberal politics.

  15. I had a dream last night where I was with Emily Ratajkowski. Could this happen by 2020? Unrealistic…

  16. The phrase, “let them eat cake” [whether it was said by Antoinette or nor] is truly less naive, out-of-touch, and irresponsible as this mess. It scares me that a grown man can even bring himself to actually write stuff like this.

  17. That is some serious crystal gripping hippie nonsense. Shaka Zulu did a number against the British without firearms. If we ever could evaporate all firearms, these dreamy lefties will be doomed to repeat the harshest of realities when people revert to edged and blunt weapons. We’d be right back to might makes right, where physical prowess overcomes, and the weak are enslaved. Talk about gruesome. GSWs can be far more survivable than getting poked with spears etc. They think it can’t happen here. Yeah right. See what happens when the power goes out and their best means of defense is gone. The cities die first…

    • Shaka Zulu also did well against other African tribes, as well, and eventually against his own. He really cleared the area for more wildlife grazing… An environmentalist’s wet dream!

  19. Liberals. They believe that all those poor ignorant natives need is a firm, fatherly hand to guide them.

    White libs in London, Paris, Brussels and DC wishing to divide up and save the poor savages.

    Wasn’t this tried before?

  20. Good lord that is possibly the most ignorant thing I’ve ever read. That’s flat out retardation. Seriously. This person needs to be confined and examined, and treated. So they can’t infect or harm anyone else with their mental disorder.

  21. Who’d miss the guns in Africa? The NYPD, they miss everything (rimshot)!

    I bet you the lions would be bloody thrilled.

  22. Naw, Africans would just go back to killing each other with stone-tools and sticks, just like they have for millennia before the Pallid People ever set foot on the Dark Continent.

    • Many years ago I saw a wildlife video on some cable channel where the men of a tribe of Pygmies hunted and killed a bull elephant using spears with 3 foot long metal points. It was gruesome, and amazingly efficient. That elephant never stood a chance.

  25. Click bait that actually gives you what the bait promised, not some ad to buy Viagra or send for their book, is not an entirely bad thing, especially when the comments are open and you can make a valid point or just bitch about click bait.

    P.S. Rwanda!

  26. Well that quite lacks all critical thought, but for the imported parts kits I’m willing to give it a try! I actually do think that allowing the import of f/a firearms from Africa to the states might have a positive impact on the African people. Just think about the money and work, while taking those evil death implements off their hands. Think we can get the libtards on board? Yeah probably not, they only like “military style” weapons in the hands of the state.

  27. That paragraph was crafted by a language-wrangler. Notice the rhetorical cheats and manipulation.

    First “…guns and other weapons…”
    Then “…guns…”
    Then “… arms…”

    So, “No,no, I’m talking about violence.” when someone says this focuses on “guns.” But the impression left is all about “guns.” Because the thing named to get rid of is “guns.” That’s an embedded “motte and baley” argument.

    Sliding to “arms” ties it to those whack jobs who talk about “keep and bear arms.” Now saying “arms” means more dead kids in Africa. That’s an embedded stealth assciation, with visuals and emotional weight.

    Also, just like those gun-guys not to care about dead Africans, because they are black … racists.

    That paragraph was crafted. Its worse if the “author” is just parroting wording they’ve picked up. That means the meme took root, and will propagate on its own, far from the origin.

  28. Imagine there’s no Lennon…it’s EZ if you try. Ya’ know there won’t be any guns in the Millennium. Until then being armed in AFREAKA is a good idea…just as in Chiraq.

  29. One of these days this guy is going to catch a spear or pickax through the eye or have his head chopped off with a knife or a shovel, but it’ll be okay because it wasn’t a gun. 🙂

  30. This is a completely stupid premise, you would need to roll back history to the time of Australopithecus afarensis(Lucy’s) time and then the weapons of choice woulds have been claws and teeth. Fighting for the preservation of life has been part of life since the first amino acids cuddled up together. It would be more practical to debate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. That being truly a subject for pinheads.pinheads

  31. A 39 year old, presumably educated, Tanzanian media writer penned this? Seriously?

    I reads more like an 11 year old girl’s fan mail letter to Taylor Swift, whose envelope she seals with a strawberry scratch-n-sniff sticker.

  32. “[T]he first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy . . . . It was a disaster . . . . The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.”

    — The Matrix

    Leftist cerebrums are more primitive than others’.

  33. So… are we assuming that resistances and rebellions are never launched in the face of brutal oppression?

    Because that would be a really stupid assumption. So this argument is stupid or evil, because taking away someone’s ability to resist brutal oppression is evil.

  36. Without guns then militants would go back to butchering each other with hoes and axes, just like they did during the Rwandan Genocide in ’94. 1.3 million dead, mostly without firearms.

    Honestly anti’s are just the most ignorant c*nts on the plant. They don’t know anything about anything. Not history, not the law, not technology.

  37. They must have missed the part of African history when thousands of machetes were handed out on street corners so that the Hutus could systematically wipe out their Tutsis neighbors.

  40. “…armed groups use to legitimize (sic) their use of guns.”

    Hmmm, I’m sure they’re just looking for an excuse to use their guns. Not like their use of guns legitimize their wicked ends.

  41. Wait… Wasn’t there a time when machetes killed more people in Africa than guns? I thought I read/heard that…

    If there was no guns doesn’t mean there will be no deaths or fighting. Didn’t Genghis Khan have a lot of people killed with a blade?

  43. Africa without guns?

    It would just leave them the tender mercies of those from outside Africa who still have them.

    North East Africa is more Arab than African because of ethnic cleansing, slavery (still exists now), and the steady march south and west of the “religion of peace”. The “Peace” of submission and slavery.

  44. The root problem with Africa, anywhere South of the Sahara and some places in the Sahara, is tribalism.

    These folks hold a grudge better than a Hatfield or a McCoy. They’ve been at war with another tribe for hundreds, if not, thousands of years. That’s not simply going to stop. If you could snap your fingers and make every weapon on the continent disappear the people there would simply make more and go right back to killing each other.

    Parts of Africa have gotten better, much better, in recent years while others have not. Improvement is, to put it charitably, uneven at best.

  47. “Man has killed man since the beginning, and each new frontier has brought new places and new ways to die; why should the future be any different?” –Col Corazon Santiago

    • A handsome young Cyborg named Ace
      Wooed women at every base
      But once ladies glanced at
      His special enhancement
      They vanished with nary a trace.

  48. Please tell me that that author has a PhD in conflict resolution or some other mickey mouse discipline. That’s the kind of outright bullshit that only doctorate can instill.

    • LOL

      The moment I finished reading the title, I found myself humming, “Who’d miss the guns down in Af-ri-ca?”

  52. It’s true. I’always about to go volunteer at my local soup kitchen when the guns call to me from the safe and make me take them to the range instead.

  53. This is an irrational quote that ignores reality. “If guns didn’t exist…” Stop! They do exist and waxing philosophic doesn’t change that, it ignores reality. Grow the F up.

  54. I think the article is silly of course. However as a gun lover myself I do wish not every remotely-social issue in these pages triggered a tirade of hate against liberals and many ignorant statements about a foreign culture (actually an entire continent in this case!). I’m no “Capital L” Liberal, but you can appreciate and respect firearms and still be a tolerant and curious person – and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way!

    • The philosophy of “leave me alone”, when turned outwards to “leave them alone”, is a powerful thing. Just leave everybody alone. I’ll do my thing. You do your thing. Over there in your country. With the proviso that if you attack me, I will win. So we’re clear, it’s “leave me alone or else.”

  56. So what they want is an Africa ruled by large, strong men armed with edged weapons and clubs.

    They tried that in Europe.

    They called it “the Dark Ages”…

  57. One of the over-educated shitheads (a professor in the Department of Psychiatry, for god’s sake) at the med ctr where I work once suggested in a newspaper op-ed that terrorists blow stuff up because of poverty, and it would be cheaper to give each terrorist a million dollars than to fight the war on terrorism. Really! He did!

    Some people, irrespective of education or socioeconomic status, are so abysmally stupid that it qualifies as a form of mental retardation.

    Charlie (wants his million dollars! lol)

  58. It would look like what it is: a 3rd world shithole, controlled by thugs.
    The primary weapon during the Rwandan genocide was a machete, shit for brains.

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