The system should instead be to arm, train and organise law-abiding citizens, including women, to deter criminals
RAWALPINDI: All deweaponisation efforts have failed so far, including that of the four martial laws. It is a ground reality that the possession of illegal arms has always been a compulsion of people for self-defence in the absence of government security, particularly in remote areas. Now, even in major cities, unarmed citizens are easy prey for armed robbers because the government is unable to tame them.
Another ground reality has yet to be accepted that it is not the arms but the criminals who commit crimes. For example, notorious thugs in Central India killed and robbed thousands of travellers using apparently harmless silk cloth to strangulate their victims to death, until eliminated by British colonial rulers in the early 19th century.
For comparison, it is pertinent to mention here that armed criminals could not be disarmed by the government but law-abiding arms licence holders have been treated as suspects since the first-most dreaded Martial Law of 1958, when they were forced to deposit arms with the police and many lost or received damaged high value arms. Cumbersome computerisation of arms licences with heavy fees for self-defence is the latest punishment awarded to law-abiding citizens, knowing very well that illegal arms are several times the licenced arms and that professional criminals do not use licenced arms. This amounts to taxing and discouraging self-defence, which serves as a deterrent to criminals. The system should instead be to arm, train and organise law-abiding citizens, including women, to deter criminals.
I humbly appeal to the worthy government, particularly the Pakistan Army, to kindly concentrate on taming criminals. They must not divert efforts for the recovery of all illegal weapons at this stage, keeping in view a realistic slogan of the United States National Rifle Association, “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
M Akram Niazi
Published in The Express Tribune, March 5th, 2017.
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