THERE’s something deeply wrong with a society that has learned to hear gunshots and believe its a party. In too many places, weddings and festivals that should be loud with music and laughter are loud with something else entirely.
Live rounds fired into the air by people who think they’re just having a good time. We call it tradition. We call it excitement. What it actually is, is people gambling with lives that aren’t theirs to gamble with.
A bullet fired into the sky doesn’t disappear. It slows down, turns around, and comes back still carrying enough force to kill. The cruelest part is that the person who fired it almost never feels that consequence. Someone else does. Someone who had nothing to do with the celebration, wasn’t invited and didn’t even know it was happening.
Fatima was in her room in Borno State. That should mean something. Her room, not the street, not anywhere near the shooting. She was exactly where a person should be safe.
A stray bullet from celebratory fire came through anyway and killed her. Neither was it a conflict nor an accident in any meaningful sense. A completely preventable death caused by someone’s decision to fire a weapon for no reason except to feel something in a moment.
Her story isn’t unusual, and that’s the problem. These incidents surface, get a brief round of condolences, and then disappear. The shooting continues. The next one happens. Another name, another family torn apart, and somehow we’re still treating this as the price of a good party.
That normalization, that quiet acceptance that this is just how things go, is more dangerous than any single bullet. It means the next Fatima is already out there, living her life, with no idea she’s in someone’s crossfire.
So why does it keep happening? It’s a status move dressed up as festivity. Some of it is pure imitation, people doing what they’ve watched others do, never stopping to think about where those bullets land.
The law isn’t actually unclear here. Discharging a firearm in a civilian area without justification is an offense. But a law that isn’t enforced isn’t really a law. It’s a suggestion, and people know it. Every time someone fires into the air at a wedding and goes home without so much as a conversation with law enforcement, that’s a signal.
An unspoken message that this is fine, that it’s tolerated, that no one’s going to do anything about it. You can’t fix that with better legislation. You fix it by actually enforcing what’s already there, consistently, in ways people can see.
Communities need to actually examine what this practice costs, not defend it because it’s familiar. Tradition isn’t sacred when it kills people. Cultures shift all the time; they shift when the people inside them decide something no longer makes sense. Imams, pastors, chiefs, teachers, journalists, anyone with a platform and credibility in a community has a responsibility to say clearly:” this isn’t celebration, it’s recklessness, and it has to stop.”
This can’t just be about outrage after the fact but about prevention. Event organizers need to prohibit firearms at gatherings and mean it.
Fatima’s death deserves more than a news cycle. It deserves to be the story that finally makes people uncomfortable enough to act, to look at what we’ve normalized and decide we’re done with it.
Celebratory gunfire isn’t a quirk of culture. It’s a practice that keeps killing innocent people, and it will keep doing that until we stop treating accountability as optional.
Joy shouldn’t need a weapon and celebrations shouldn’t have casualties.
- West is a seasoned journalist and development practitioner with over a decade of experience in media, human rights advocacy, and NGO leadership. Her syndicated column, The Wednesday Lens, is published every Wednesday in News Point Nigeria newspaper. She can be reached at bomawest111@gmail.com.