Was That Totally Necessary?

Sometimes here in Zambia, things seem a little over the top to me – that’s a little bit of an understatement actually. One of those over the top moments happen last week as we were taking Kristin’s parents for a little outing to the Blue Moon Cafe for coffee.

As we were driving through a residential apartment area of town, I stopped at a T-junction to wait for an opening in traffic to turn right. I noticed that down the road to my left was some sort of convoy coming down the road towards us fast and definitely expecting traffic to get out of their way. As they got closer, I realized that it was some sort of military convoy that must have been escorting a high ranking official. In the lead car was an officer in the driver’s seat waving a hand gun out the window to help “motivate” people to get out of their way. The last vehicle was a truck with a couple of military guys with AK-47s standing up in the back of the truck waving their AK-47’s.

When the convoy entered the T-junction, there was some confusion from the motorists, since the convoy came so fast and were demanding that everyone get out of the way and the street was busy and there were few places to move off the road to. A lady was in front of the convoy and was attempting to turn down the street that we were stopped at. When she didn’t turn fast enough, the officer in the lead car waving the handgun first lifted the gun up (in the direction of our car!) and then pointed it straight into the air and fired a warning shot to get the lady to move out of the way faster.

That is where I started thinking, Was that totally necessary? What if your finger slipped, and you fired at our car on your way to pointing your gun in the air? And that bullet has to come down sometime – hopefully not on someone! Was that totally necessary??