Americans bear arms like Ugandans carry SIM cards

Nations, like every individual person on earth, each have a blind spot. Uganda’s is lawlessness and impunity, two great ills that have become such a perfect blend in our society that we hardly notice, or care, about personal or communal transgressions of the law that are so common around us.

Witness how the police, guardians of the law, break it wantonly with dangerous mechanical vehicles or wrongful arrest and enforcement. Lawlessness runs along our roads where vehicles with government registered number plates jostle with taxis to break traffic regulations. Impunity runs from disobedience of school rules to the lax enforcement of civil law to the disregard of constitutionalism.

Lawlessness in Uganda percolates from the bottom up, with those entrusted with authority and power shamelessly shoving down a “do as I say, not as I do” tune on those they lead.
How then can Ugandans wishfully think of constitutionalism when they cannot even lift a finger to a bully ‘boda boda’ riding down the wrong direction of a one-way street? Mchezo nyingi!

Kenya’s blind spot, it could be argued, is pride in being First Among Mediocres. Kenya has done well, particularly economically and socially in our region, and tends to take first place on many measures. But this is only relative. Placed on the weighing scale of global wellbeing, Kenya too is found wanting, for it is just another poor state in a poor region. President Museveni once referred to this as a “dwarf taking pride in being taller than the other pygmies”, or words to that effect.

Britain’s blind spot is insularity that is couched, paradoxically, in the expectation to sustain global relevance. America’s is, alas, the gun culture. Americans talk of the “right to bear arms as a symbol of liberty”.

The US fascinates and infuriates in equal measure, and what better illustrates this paradox than two events this week? A few hours after a gunman in Las Vegas killed nearly 60 and wounded 500 others, the Nobel Committee announced that this year’s Prize for Physiology/Medicine would be awarded to three Americans for insights into how “our inner clock adapts our physiology to the dramatically different phases of the day. The clock regulates critical functions such as behaviour, hormone levels, sleep, body temperature and metabolism.” Death and Life!

The Las Vegas gunman is part of those known as “super-owners” – one of the estimated 7.7 million Americans who own between eight and 140 guns. He had 42 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. If I had 42 mobile phones or SIM cards, given that Ugandans are fond of multiple phone lines, surely Godfrey Mutabazi and Kale Kayihura would take an interest in me.
In Las Vegas, it appears that not much attention was taken in a man who accumulated more guns than a Ugandan military detach. How come? One Ugandan who lived in the US for decades put it thus: “Even now people cannot talk about regulation of guns in the US because guns are part of who Americans are.

Guns were the means by which slaves, Indians and other minorities were subdued to serve the interests of the ‘rest’. It is part of the ‘White-Superiority’ complex. Though history keeps repeating itself … Americans are refusing to learn the lesson. His owning 42 guns and carrying them up to his hotel room is no big deal at all for a rich folk.

Most hotels don’t have any detectors and if you are rich and white, carrying lots of heavy bags will not attract any attention whatsoever. They will figure you are a hunter, golfer, or musician, who is about to do a concert. I once talked about a white supervisor of mine who had many guns under his bed! Some were automatic weapons! A very normal but eccentric guy. From then on, I used my words carefully around him! Foundations, of course, are critical for the course a life takes. America expanded in the Wild West. It is yet to be delivered of the wildness. May it be spared the truism “he who lives by the sword….”
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