Rapper gets a small gun license: Nura now has a gun

I've been listening to Nura Habib Omer, stage name Nura, since I discovered SXTN at the beginning of my studies. I felt heretical listening to “From Party to Party” on the way home. I liked her solo album, I liked her as an actress in “Die Discounter”. But I like her above all because she opens her mouth to everything. No matter whether it's about Fridays for Future, CSDs or Palestine. There's something liberating and connective about Nura's volume.

That's why my heart sank over the weekend when a friend asked me on the way back from the cinema: "How do you feel about the fact that Nura now has a small firearms license?" Nura? Weapons? How can she?!

When I got home, I immediately looked at Nura's Instagram account. There she explains in a video how she got the so-called small firearms license. Because of the Insta restrictions, she calls it the “Pew-Pew bill” and writes: “Cornell 7 is everywhere” - a reference to 7 men who are accused of raping a student at the elite US university Cornell.

Nura says that she has already been stalked by several men. She says that the gun license is intended to protect her. Nura is a black woman who fled to Germany with her family when she was 3 years old. With her body and her voice, with which she repeatedly expresses herself politically, she is in a public space in which she is simultaneously exposed to racist and sexist attacks. I can't know what that feels like. What I know: I admire Nura for how she processes this in her performances and songs. And I can understand your self-protection argument.

But the thought of guns makes me sick. Even if the small firearms license is “only” about blank pistols, irritants and signal weapons. But I also feel sick when I think about how a woman like Nura - who I've always perceived as strong - feels like she needs a weapon to protect herself.

Nura is not alone in arming oneself: the number of small firearms licenses in Germany increased in 2025. At the end of last year a record number of 900,000 was counted. At the same time, the use of firearms is also increasing: According to police crime statistics, 119 cases were recorded in Berlin, which is 68 percent more than in the previous year. What happens to a society when more and more people feel they have to arm themselves?

I have noticed that the topic of weapons and violence has been taken up more often recently, for example by young artists. I'm thinking of “Lip gloss on the Kalash” by Wa22ermann. Or to Bangerfabrique: “Death to all abusers who die!”

The Cornell 7 case represents a world in which young women are nowhere safe from men. Not in front of men who rape and men who watch.

I try to imagine what it would be like to carry a gun. What if someone takes it from me? What if a situation escalates because both sides have a weapon? What if the tool that is supposed to give me security ends up being used against me?

I watch more tour videos of Nura standing on stage in front of thousands. Confident.