Rush for arms licences

Due to the deteriorating situation of law and order and collapse of the government’s writ in some parts of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, many of the government employees have acquired arms licences while others are in a hurry to join the scramble. In a report submitted to the provincial government, the coordinating officers in all of KP’s 24 districts informed the concerned authorities that more than 150,000 of such employees had so far acquired arms licenses while several others were in the process of submitting applications for the purpose. Acute sense of insecurity found among the general public can be gauged from the fact that, for the first time in the 63-year-long history of independence, about 2,000 female nurses, both married and unmarried, working in government hospitals have also obtained licences for .30- and .32-bore pistols. There have been cases in the past in which suicide bombers targeted even the paramedical staff of district headquarters hospitals just when they were busy receiving the casualties arriving from a blast site. Apart from the militants, hospital nurses feel threatened by the patients and, after the recent incident in a hospital in Karachi, even by some of the senior doctors.

Basically trained like the proverbial Florence Nightingale to save human lives, one is not sure whether the female nurses will really find the nerve to whip out a pistol to virtually take the life of a supposedly hostile individual. The newfound trend among government employees to acquire licences for weapons to use in self-defence shows amply how even the ‘most obedient servants’ do not trust the traditional security apparatus put in place for their protection by the administration. However, the unresolved dilemma so far is how a tender woman with a .30 pistol will scare away a hard-boiled militant brandishing a Kalashnikov rifle.