You can kill anyone, son by Zarrar Khuhro

When I was a teenager, back when the world was young and the television had one channel, an event took place that I, barring senile dementia, will be hard-pressed to forget. A friend’s younger brother, he must have been 13 or 14 at the time, was hanging out with his buddies. As a joke, one of the boys picked up a shotgun and pointed it at him. Saquib, which is what we’ll call him, laughed it off, not taking his eyes off the Archie comic he was reading. For some reason that detail in particular sticks in the mind. His friend pulled the trigger, and in an instant, Saquib was dead. The gun, as it turned out, was loaded. It was a killing joke. We grew up around guns; they were a part of our lives. Oh, not the way they are now, when Vigos loaded with armed guards will stare you down on the roads, when hormonal teenagers will resolve minor arguments with firearms, possibly over-compensating for what puberty did not grant them, when detached and self-obsessed parents won’t take the time out to teach their children responsibility, assuming they ever learned it themselves. There were fights, bloody ones, and then there was, more often than not, the ‘compromise’. An opportunity to grandstand and act like one of those characters in those action movies we all loved so much and then go home feeling like a badass thug. Who ended up on top also depended on who had the most ‘backing’, a term used for influence, whether that came through a ‘feudal’ father, a cousin associated with the newly notorious MQM and so on. But there were a few things we, some of us at least, were taught. One is that a gun is always loaded. It doesn’t matter if you dismantled and reassembled it yourself, it’s loaded. It doesn’t matter if you checked the chamber 12 times; it’s loaded and ready to kill. Because that’s what guns are for. They aren’t an extension of your paltry manhood; they aren’t status symbols or some reflection of your culture. They are tools, plain and simple, and they must be treated with respect. Respect, of course, is something that we seem to have dispensed with along the way; that, and accountability. Not surprising, after all, for a country whose people are suffering from what is now an advanced state of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Not surprising, for an asylum that has been taken over by the lunatics. But this isn’t an attempt to look at the past through rose-tinted glasses. We didn’t get here overnight, and, let’s face facts; none of us can say we didn’t see it coming. Slowly, fists were replaced with sticks, then with knives and finally with guns of increasing sophistication and lethality. You can thank the Kalashnikov culture and its influx of cheap weapons; you can thank the rise of ‘militant wings’, you can blame a mutated culture that respects strength in its crudest form. You can blame a state that relied on naked, unaccountable force to achieve its ends. The fish, after all, rots from the head and, in this case, took quite some time before it could arrive at this advanced stage of decomposition. And now we’ve been exposed to its noxious fumes for so long that we breathe them in without a wrinkle of the nose. It’s the new normal. There’s also a natural tendency, when cases like the DHA shootout occur, to blame the usual suspects. The incident left an 18-year-old boy, Suleman Lashari and a police guard dead, while another teenager and private security guard were also injured. The injured boy, Salman Abro, is alleged to have take taken his father's guards to Suleman's residence where he was shot dead by Salman’s guard. It’s ‘feudal culture’ many will say, and to an extent this is correct. Typically, this then descends into point-scoring and agenda-pushing. The word ‘feudal’ in Pakistan is of course code for rural, and – here in the south, code for Sindhi. That’s easy to do, and there’s a reason water flows downhill, following as it does the path of least resistance. It’s also politically convenient. But it would be more accurate to blame what is a culture of absolute impunity. A culture where the powerful, be they landed ‘nobility’ super-rich industrialists, well-connected politicians or jumped-up gangsters (political, sectarian and so on) can torture, kill and intimidate without any check. Because, that is now the country we live and, quite often, die in. Is there a solution? Not really. Saying ‘stay safe’ won’t cause a magical shield to descend upon us. We cannot keep our children locked up at home, and nor can we protect them from the vagaries of the insane world that await outside our gates. The most we can do is arm them, not with weapons, but with wisdom and understanding. And pray that, when they do inevitably end up in a fight, it ends in bruised egos, not bullets. ********************************************************* Zarrar Khuhro is a Dawn staff member.