Should students be taught how to use guns?

Students in Pakistan have an added pressure of fearing for their lives

Recently, primarily as a response to the massacre of nearly 140 schoolchildren at the Army Public School in Peshawar late last year, many schools in Karachi and in fact across the entire nation have sent their students and teachers to receive special training from the police on how to act in emergency situations and while facing terrorist attacks. This includes training in the handling of firearms and, in some cases, on how to defuse an explosive device. With more and more soft targets coming under attack from the terrorists, one could argue that the need for such training has never been greater and that desperate times such as these call for desperate measures.

The police have not only instructed students on how to act in situations under which their schools may come under attack, but has also recreated a scenario of a terrorist attack to show the students exactly how to act. Students and teachers have also been made to fire guns and pistols in a shooting range. The exercise as a whole was conducted successfully and the students and teachers gained valuable skills in how to react if schools ever came under threat.

However, it is sad to see that times have got so bad, and the situation so volatile, that such extreme and desperate measures are being taken by institutions whose primary purpose is to impart education and learning. The need for such training is a testament to the lack of security and safety being faced by Pakistanis in general and by the youth of this nation in particular.

Consider what children in the vast majority of countries do in their teen years: they are able to play outside their homes without fear, to walk freely, to go cycling with friends and/or relatives without fear of being abducted, mugged or getting caught in a gun battle and in general have fun like all children are supposed to. Can I, as a teenager, do this in a city like Karachi? The answer should be obvious to all readers, and the result is that many people my age in Pakistan are living a childhood and adolescence which feels incomplete, not least because we cannot do the things that our parents were able to while growing up. The only real pressures students the world over would face are related to school grades and other such problems. However, in Pakistan, students have the added pressure of fearing for their lives.

While one argument is that asking students to learn how to use guns is a step that was necessary following the horrific APS Peshawar incident, as a nation we must take a step back and look at what this means for society in general. Although the measures themselves were taken out of necessity, and the action of schools cannot be faulted, a long-term solution needs to be found since after all a student should not be spending his or her time learning how to use a firearm.

A long-term solution that is effective will have to be one that does not compromise on the sense of security that the youth of this nation deserve to enjoy, but at the same time, is able to confront and defeat this monster once and for all.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 11^th,  2015.

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