Some years ago in a place outside My Uganda, I remember my friends and I were in town, I’m not sure exactly what we were doing there but, at this particular moment there were some security guards or police officers or maybe they were the cash-in-transit security guards. Anyway, one of the guys I was with pointed out that they had assault-rifles and they were standing right in front of us. Although we didn’t immediately scatter running for our lives as we should have (we didn’t even move a little), he did go on about how absurd the situation was, it was simply odd to have these people (there were just two of them), in the middle of a shopping area/centre with assault rifles; at least side arms or pistols or even crowd control short guns, the ones that shoot out the little metals balls and reload with a pump-action movement like the big water guns, either of those would have been better than assault rifles.
Well... since that conversation, in every town that I have been to, even those here in My Uganda, I can’t help but take notice of the security guards with guns that stand outside banks and such buildings. Now, tie this relatively new awareness with the stories that have come up in the news, most recently in Norway about Anders Behring Breivik’s killing spree.
Put these together and then you can understand my increased apprehensiveness towards this one security guard that I have recently been meeting on my evening walks into town. He is just a regular guy with an un-tucked shirt; unbutton at the collar and a long short-gun slung on his back like a back-pack would on one shoulder. He is just a regular guy coming from work in the evening, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is carrying a gun. Every time I have seen him I have tried to imagine what I would do if he did loose his mind and start to shoot picking us out at random.