07 April 2014 (11:46 UTC-07 Tango)/06 Jumada t-Tania 1435/18 Farvardin 1393/08 Wu-Chen 4712

“Scholars of these sorts of events say that the killers, armed mostly with machetes and clubs, nonetheless did their work five times as fast as the mechanized gas chambers used by the Nazis.”-Bill Clinton, then U.S. President during 1998 speech to Rwandans

20 years ago more than 1-million people were literally slaughtered like lambs during what is now called the Rwandan Genocide. And that was just over a three month period, and the main weapon was not a gun!

The predominant weapon used in the slaughter was a farming tool, an edged weapon called the machete.

A study titled Machetes and Firearms: The Organization of Massacres in Rwanda revealed that despite the intentional distribution of guns to the general public by the government, supposedly in preparation for the genocide, the machete accounted for 52.8% of killings!

But wait, guns still didn’t make second place for preferred killing tool!  The old fashioned cave man tool called the Club accounted for 16.6% of killings!

Guns accounted for 14.7% of killings, and the rest of the killings involved all kinds of perverse acts using other farming tools, hangings, burnings, buried alive, starvation, or being thrown into a septic tank or being run over by a tractor.

But it’s clear, the Machete was King of Death in Rwanda, accounting for more than half a million people killed in just three months!  Where’s my gun?