Eons ago, some blokes made gun culture the centre-piece of American life. But back then, it wasn’t such an illogical idea.
It was western — read American — frontiers time, and the creed was kill or be killed. It was a tough and daunting era!
The guys from Europe: many of them flushed out outlaws to save the British Isles from the terrible prediction of Thomas Malthus, the dire economist; many others just hung-ho adventurers — killed, to impose their will, on the so-called “new world”.
The natives, generically referred to as Red Indians, got killed, their lands grabbed; their culture disrupted, if not entirely destroyed.
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown, was a book, non-fiction, that served the odyssey and tragedies of these native Americans, under the onslaught of trigger-happy western Cowboys, who galloped into town, shooting from both sides of the hip!
Still, these crimes were served as hip, in numerous “westerns”, the general genre of films that jumped off the TV screens. One popular “western” — at least to impressionable kids growing up in Lagos, savouring the new magic of TV — was Bonanza.
I remember very well, linking the names of the principal Bonanza cast: “Dan Blocker, Michael Landon (who many of us called “London”), Pernell Roberts, Lorne Greeeeeeeeeneee …” to the series’ opening sound track, as we sang along and dashed towards the windows of the few neighbours that had TV sets.
It was yet another treat of all-out action, watching, cheering and beaming, as the Cartwright quad strut their stuff in their expansive ranch. They were goodly folks, to be sure, but their heroics glorified the shoot-dive-and-die in our young minds …
Now, this is neither a brief sortie into American frontiers history nor a re-cap of childhood TV fantasies in the Lagos of 1970s.
It’s only back-grounding the avoidable tragedy of the 4 July 2022 Highland Park, Illinois, shootings at America’s 246th independence anniversary parade.
That lethal splash from Robert Crimo III, 21, on America’s near-iconic Independence Day, killed seven and left more than 30 injured, many of them seriously, including an eight-year-old boy, now paralyzed from the waist down, no thanks to a spray of bullets that shattered his spine!
A few days earlier on June 25, Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara State had announced a sensational policy which purported to grant long-suffering Zamfara people legal arms to “defend” themselves against bandits and terrorists.
Here, you have two jurisdictions: the one, old and set in its gun ways; even weaving phony heroics into sure self-destruction; the other, young and naive but which, in blind panic, is about rail-roading itself into the American gun quagmire and nightmare!
It’s high time someone, somewhere jerked awake at this critical juncture. It’s time to open serious talks to formalize state police.
Otherwise, Nigeria risks falling into the American pit, long after the present security challenges are history. So, the time to act is now!
But back to the hubris the Americans preen and dub gun culture.
How can you develop the model federal policing system, the most formidable military on earth — land, air or sea, backed by the most fearsome munitions and perhaps the most inventive military industrial complex — and yet you declare yourselves unsafe except as many citizens as possible have access to legal arms?
Does that even make any sense? Only on June 24, a few days before the Crimo massacre, the US Supreme Court stoutly shot down a State of New York law which deigned to restrict gun-carrying rights, despite the epidemic of gun violence, which has always plagued the United States.
A BBC report of June 23: “Justice Clarence Thomas, writing on behalf of the six conservative judges who make up the court’s majority, ruled that Americans have a right to carry ‘commonly used’ firearms in public for personal defence.”
Ten days later, Robert Crimo struck, right in the revelry of America’s birthday! Hubris never had a more tragic price! But America would sort out its own mess — or live or die with it! But again, Nigeria can learn from America’s self-imposed snares.
That brings the issue back to the Zamfara new gun policy and, if it holds, its ramifications for the rest of Nigeria some 50 years down the line.
Before you lionize or demonize Governor Matawelle, please know his action came from sheer executive impotence, faced with the daily and savage toll bandits and allied terrorists extract from his people.
That is made possible by Nigeria’s rather funny unitary security architecture, in a supposed federal state. If the Federal Government is neither blind nor hard of hearing, it should have seen and heard enough that the present system is failing. It’s therefore time to federalize the Police — and radically too!
Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, the Ondo governor that weighed in, who seemed to serenade the Zamfara move, was more visceral than clinical. But then, you hardly can blame him too — for he, himself, spoke from the prism of the June 18 Owo terror attack on defenceless worshippers, on which the governor could do nothing.
But even with throes of executive impotence and their people’s contempt, governors should stop presenting the dire security situation as some opposing regions locked in mutual Armageddon.
North, South, East or West, they should pitch it as a common plague, set to consume everyone, should the Federal Government continue to be obdurate on a security architecture that continues to flounder, when the chips are down.
Such pan-Nigeria sense of dominant threat and angst would bring pressure, from all quarters, on the central authorities: it’s time not only to federalize the Police but also time to train the most basic cells, of the new Police system, in basic anti-terrorism and and anti-insurgency skills, with munitions to match.
That’s what Nigeria requires now: state police armed with emergent skills to deal with the present threats.
So, the Zamfara gambit should be no push for yet another series of gubernatorial grandstanding, over real or imagined ethno-regional threats, with the posturing governors savouring loud but sterile cheers from their home camps.
It’s rather time to face down on present perils, with a historic sense of responsibility. Nigeria’s extant security system has been flailing under insecurity. That’s the common enemy. It’s therefore time to muster the political will to change the story for good.
Let the Zamfara gambit serve as nothing more than epochal shock therapy. Guns-for-all is no path to follow.
Nigeria can’t afford to ape America that romanticized its gun culture for 246 years, only to be reminded of its stark wilderness, on its 246th independence anniversary!
A well-trained and well-oiled federalized police (ironically like America’s) should banish such a spectre here!