Re-weaponisation?: Govt eases ban on carrying weapons, allows only ‘necessary’ display

Roughly 300 licences a day were issued in the former home minister’s tenure.


Our Correspondent March 13, 2012

KARACHI:


All political parties have said that Karachi needs to be de-weaponised, but despite this, the government lifted a ban on carrying arms, saying that people needed self-defence.


“It has been felt that the ban is causing uncalled [sic] hassle to the licence holders who have to go through the ordeal of procuring [a] carry permit after obtaining legal licences,” said the official notification issued on Monday.

The notification vaguely states that there is no ban on carrying weapons but that “unnecessary display” should not be made. It does not specify under what circumstances it is deemed necessary or unnecessary to display weapons.

The fact is that even while the ban was imposed in the city, the display of weapons never came to a halt.

In fact, just on Saturday Sindh Home Minister Manzoor Wassan revealed that the government feels that target killings and extortion have gone up again after a short breather since the violence last summer. He says that the government is working on tackling it but no concrete plan on de-weaponisation has been made public so far.

The home department issues licences but plenty of illegal ones are floating around. The chief of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee Ahmed Chinoy said, “There is no doubt that when thousands of licences are given out, that there will be some misuse.”

Chinoy added that there are not even enough training centres in the city to accommodate the numbers of people who get licences, so many people who are carrying weapons are not even trained in safely using them.

Even with de-weaponisation plans in the past, Chinoy says that the problem is that nothing sticks because the state of the country is such that people feel threatened with the rampant crime and militancy. “There are so many guards carrying guns, the police are displaying guns; are we really in that much danger?” he asked. “We still have to ask ourselves at the end of the day, what kind of image do we want to project in society.”

From the time Pakistan was created to the year of the attack on the World Trade Centre, that is 1947 to 2001, the government issued 50,000 arms licences in Sindh. In the next decade, from 2001 to 2011, however, ten times the number of arms licences were handed out: 500,000. These numbers were provided by Wajid Ali Durrani who was answering questions in the Supreme Court in September. The former Sindh home minister, Zulfiqar Mirza, had at a public rally in Lyari town claimed that he had issued 300,000 arms licences during his tenure. This comes to roughly 300 licences a day.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 13th, 2012.

COMMENTS (2)

Forbidden Fruit | 12 years ago | Reply "Circles" is what we run in.
Forbidden Fruit | 12 years ago | Reply

"Circles" is what we run in.

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