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Health & Fitness

Lessons from Boko Haram

After a group of terrorists kidnapped almost three hundred school girls, Americans from all walks of life stood up and politely asked the terrorists to pretty please “bring back our girls.” Other Americans tried to shame the men responsible (who have burned people alive) by proclaiming that “real men don't buy girls.” While we wait for these tactics to prevail, we can learn some lessons from the incident.

First, some background. The night the girls were kidnapped, 15 soldiers assigned to the town where the school is located were warned that approximately 200 terrorists would be attacking. The soldiers requested backup from a nearby barracks located an hour away and then prepared to defend the town. Two hours after the soldiers received the warning, Boko Haram arrived. The government soldiers, vastly outnumbered, held off the terrorists for an hour and a half. The soldiers fled for their lives after they ran out of ammunition. Without further resistance, the terrorists kidnapped the girls and disappeared.

First lesson: The government cannot always protect you.

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Second lesson: Calling for help from the government does not guarantee the help will arrive in time to stop bad men from doing bad things.

Other lessons we can learn from Boko Haram require a little more background. Boko Haram has been committing violent atrocities in Nigeria for several years. The Nigerian government responded to the violence by ordering Nigerians to surrender their guns and ammunition to the police. As incentive, the government announced that anyone possessing guns or ammunition after the collection would be considered to be a member of Boko Haram. The program was very successful and many law-abiding Nigerians surrendered their guns and ammunition. However, as the raid on the school demonstrated, the members of Boko Haram did not surrender their weapons. Although many Nigerians would like to resist Boko Haram, they cannot because they surrendered their weapons.

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Third lesson: Bad guys do not voluntarily surrender their weapons to the government.

Fourth lesson: Gun confiscations make violent criminals safer.

Fifth lesson: If you don't have weapons, you have to rely on the government to protect you. Refer to the first and second lessons.

For another lesson, we can study recent events in the Mexican state of Michoacán. Towns in the state were being violently oppressed by a drug cartel and the police and military failed to protect the innocent people living in those towns. When people realized that the government would not save them, the people broke Mexican laws by arming themselves and forming an illegal militia.

It worked.

The drug cartels have not been defeated, but their influence has been drastically reduced. The drug cartel is far better funded than Boko Haram and the non-government forces were able to successfully defend themselves. Their success has been rather embarrassing for the Mexican government, which has responded by requiring the militia members to register their weapons and become nominal members of the rural police department.

Sixth lesson, non-government forces armed with modern weapons can protect themselves from even an organized drug cartel.

Image credit thetimes.co.uk
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