Need an assault weapon?

New ways to end gun troubles
By Gordon Opiyo

[Security consultant Taya] Weiss says she was shocked during her interviews in the slums of Nairobi that one could easily get an AK-47 for as little as $20 (Sh1,600).

In one of the interviews a slum dweller says; "If you inform the police about a person in possession of a gun, he will go and get a bribe... if Florence is my friend and I know she has a gun, and CJ is a policeman, if I tell him that she (Florence) has a gun, he (CJ) will go to her, and because she has money, she will bribe him and (he will) tell her who reported her. And so she comes back to you for revenge. There is no security of information. Instead people who have guns being arrested, they bribe their way out and come for revenge.

If it weren't illegal merely to possess a gun, it wouldn't be so lucrative for police to take bribes. Same with drugs, by the way.

You may know that your neighbour has a gun and that it will kill your brother somewhere else, but you can do nothing about it."

That's quite an assumption "that it will kill your brother". Though, Kenya, from what I hear is amuck with disorder. My brother-in-law went there on a mission in Bible College. He said you don't go anywhere without a bodyguard. Where's their government?

To her [Weiss], dealing with root causes of small arms demand would be more profitable. The key demand factors that emerged during her research include resource management issues, identity-based conflict (with ethnicity, youth and tribal affiliations causing fracture points), availability of small arms, economic factors (such as unemployment and poverty), low literacy rates and limited contacts with the "main community".

Yup. Free your economy, enforce property rights and don't ban every damn thing.