As if I needed another reason...

... to hate the "news" media.

Yeah - turn the guns into jewelry. Great idea. That'll fix all of Africa's problems. Art as salvation.

Never mind the grinding poverty, drought, starvation, history of tribal hatred or even European colonial exploitation. And I'm sure African "coming-of-age" rituals involving pain, beating young boys into men or that untidy female genital-mutilation thing don't contribute to the violence, either. Do I even need to mention AIDS? Take away the guns, beat the swords into plowshares, and you'll live in peace and sunshine and Californian bliss.

Please.

Africans don't need the guns to kill each other. Look at the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. They turned hacking each other to death with machetes into an art of their own. I guess they figured machetes are cheaper than guns and require less maintenance.

You want to know what happens when you give up your guns when you live in an environment rife with tribal or ethnic hatred? Ask a Bosnian. Or a Jew who survived the Holocost.

That's the quick way to turn what would have been a civil war into genocide.

Fools.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10627036/from/RS.2/

"Only the dead have seen the end of war. "
-Plato