Somalia a land of chaos, awash in weapons

Summary

March 1, 2009: Somalia has been flooded with weapons, fuelling the disordered state of Somali society, and affecting neighbours such as Kenya. The guns come from a bewildering number of different countries, including China, the United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Ukraine, Finland and North Korea.

Source

Bibliography

1. Original article

Game and Story Use

• The PCs could travel to Somalia to meet with an arms dealer - either as customers, or because they want to take him out.
• Conversely, PCs with a mixed bag of assorted weapons could find Somalia a good place to get rid of them - albeit not exactly at top dollar.
• In between the two cases, PCs could be assigned to find out how a given consignment of weapons ended up in Somalia - this would usually be because something readily identifiable showed up where it was not meant to be and started a hunt. Employers could be a government agency, or perhaps an arms manufacturer trying to prove that they didn't violate their export licence.
• Given that the headline description has applied to Somalia time out of mind - and was not even entirely suppressed when the place was under colonial rule - all manner of valuable (if possibly well worn) antique pieces could be found hanging about and likely acquired for the price of an off-label AKM (or possibly as a part trade in for one to avoid excessive suspicion … after all, if you offer a "clearly superior modern rifle" in straight exchange for a man's father's wild goat shooting gun he may suspect something is up, whilst if you offer to sell the man a brand new rifle and, when he offers you a trade, suggest he "throw in that old musket, I know a man who owns a museum who might give me a few dollars for it", haggling can then proceed).