When Your Government Won't Protect You...

A Wall Street Journal article in the June 27, 2014 Australian:

MANY people in northern Nigeria, frustrated by a five-year insurgency and what they call a lack of military protection, are ordering what passes for bulletproof clothing, buying homemade muskets and organising ragtag militias.

The move towards self protection — born of years of suicide ­attacks, shooting rampages and mass abductions of girls and boys — underscores what limited headway the military has made against Boko Haram, the Islamist insurgency whose war against the government has left more than 14,000 people dead in three years, according to New York’s Council on Foreign Relations.

It appears that they are buying home-made pistols and muskets.  I suspect that this is partly because of Nigerian gun control (which is pretty severe), and partly because of severe poverty.