By Joe Kiarie and Kenfrey Kiberenge

Although the country has never been rocked by civil strife like some of its neighbours, it is home to thousands of illegally owned firearms.

Conflict experts say wars in some of the neighbouring countries have made it easy to access guns. Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Southern Sudan, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo have been at war for many years.

But the experts say the Government’s failure to effectively patrol expansive and remote borders has aggravated the situation.

"Somalia and Sudan are some of the most politically unstable countries in Africa. Decades of war have left a stockpile of illegally owned firearms," says Wainaina Ndung’u, the executive director of the International Centre for Policy and Conflict.

He says the long and isolated border with Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Rwanda, as well as the 536-kilometre coastline are hard to patrol due to limited resources and insufficient training.

"This poor patrol of the borders between Kenya and its neighbours has facilitated the influx of large quantities of small arms into the country," he says.

Phillip Ochieng of PeaceNet-Kenya says the country should emulate Uganda, which has made attempts to check cross-border arms trade.

"When pastoralists from Kenya want to graze their livestock in Uganda, there is a point where they leave their arms and pick them on their way back. This is the way to go," he says.

It is estimated there are 100 million small arms in the continent, especially around the Horn of Africa.

Ochieng says in countries like Sudan, Somalia and the DRC, guns are part of the culture and almost everyone carries a weapon.

Somalia has been engulfed in intermittent civil war since 1991. The conflict has caused instability, with the current phase of the conflict seeing the Somali government losing substantial control of the country to Al Shabaab and Islamic Party. Somali rebels have for years been supplied with sophisticated weapons by some western nations, some of which later find their way into Kenya.

The ongoing civil strife in the DRC has been described as Africa’s First World War.

The conflict has directly involved seven nations among them Kenya, which shelters refugees from the troubled nation.

Since the outbreak of fighting in August 1998, about 5.4 million people have died, making it the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II.

The Second Sudanese Civil War started in 1983, although it was largely a continuation of the First Sudanese Civil War of 1955 to 1972. It predominantly took place, in southern Sudan and was one of the longest lasting and deadliest wars of the later 20th century.

Roughly 1.9 million civilians have been killed in southern Sudan, and more than four million southerners have been forced to flee their homes at one time or another since the war began, most finding shelter in Kenya. And even after the conflict ended with the signing of a peace agreement in January 2005, the porous border with northern Kenya has encouraged trading of arms.

Joseph Kony’s Lord Resistance Army has been waging war for the last two decades.