Isaiah 54:17 “no weapon forged against me shall prosper”
Isaiah
3:10Tell the righteous it will be well with them,
for they will enjoy the fruit of their deeds.
...And I can quote many more verses from the holy book. Just
what are the pastors portraying when they ask the government to supply them
with guns for protection? Does it mean that they don’t believe in the divine?
Everyone is afraid of their security and hence the
increased call for arms by all and sundry. The clergy are crying foul in all
our headlines presently. Apparently the church is under attack chiefly as a
facility by a group of people not seen as believers. This has been the catalyst
to an unending chorus for arming civilians and private security firms.
What are the implications of these calls? In
well-developed and somewhat stable states like the United States of America the
issuing of arms to civilians is a norm well practiced, but this comes with
great responsibilities. The death toll from firearms in
the US suggests that the country is gripped by civil war. Studies show that More
Americans lost their lives from firearms in the past 45 years than in all wars
involving the US. The big question here then should be do we want Kenya to get
to that? If this statistics were anything to go by and in view of how our
country is, there will be no single living person in this country in the next
45 years.
To absorb the scale of the mayhem, the increased demand
for arms may completely change the social order and we would therefore be
exposed to dealing with a giant pro-arms lobby and regulatory structure. It
would be a revolution to say the list. By the IG even been pensive on the issue
of giving more arms, the message vividly passed across then would be that we
are incapable of devising a less violent approach to curb the menace.
In a country where a mother would be killed because of not
paying a mere 10/= fare in a matatu, a husband would kill a wife because of a
50/= shillings note that disappeared in the house and boys would gauge each other’s
eyes out because of a mango seed. In view of all this historic Lunacy where
will this country be if every time I go to church the very guy who comes to
collect my tithe and offering will be brandishing an automatic rifle on one
hand and an offering basket on the other.
I am pretty sure in fact I am a hundred percent certain,
that when Jesus told peter to sheath his sword he did not have this in mind.
By Ken Kibiru
