One of the greatest things about traveling is speaking with the locals about their perceptions of the US.

In my taxi from the airport last night, I had a long conversation with Mwenbeko about guns in America. He was so astonished that the government allowed so many people to have guns. As an avid watcher of CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera, he’s always been fascinated as to why Americans have armed themselves to what seems to be a very high degree.

I explained the genesis of the Second Amendment and why the gun debate is so contentious right now.  In the end, his interesting observation: in Tanzania nobody has guns because they are all too poor to afford one and they have very little to protect anyway.