Guns and Roses

Antigun sculpture at the UN

Don’t get me wrong!!!! I am not keen to talk about the Los Angeles based American hard rock band, Guns N’ Roses of 80’s; neither even interested to know the whole lot story about selecting this name for their group.

For me there is a sensitive issue which relates to my subject field and has immense impact on every individual’s life, directly or indirectly, and that is about Guns (weapons of all kind) and Roses (the foolish concept people being protected after holding it). Human being’s inventions have great impact on social life, bad or good depends on their type and intentions behind their usage.

Guns are human beings’ worst ever invention; it started in ninth century when Chinese people used bamboo tubes to fight against Mongol invaders.  From there it gradually ranged to Europe and then with kind support of monetarist vultures it spread all over the World, now almost every fool owns one.

It’s not one feels secure while holding a gun; it rather maximizes one’s fear which leads to a genocidal act. I have a belief that, spending on guns means confirming ones death no matter how good your intentions are. It’s not only third world countries where gun culture is on the rise but the statistics collected by the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes) and Small Army Survey  through its annual crime, guns and drugs survey.

The UNODC has a special unit of data on firearm homicides, where one can read detail information by the size of population and compare it to other crimes. As some major countries are missing from the records- including Russia, China and Afghanistan -but the list takes in the US, UK and many other developed nations.

According to a study by the Small Arms Survey (2007), the US has the highest gun possession rate in the world, and the average is 88 per 100 people. This places the US first in the world for gun possession, but the number two country, Yemen, has considerably fewer possession rates 54.8 per 100 people.  Surprisingly the US doesn’t have the nastiest gun murder rate; this crown fits to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. But the fact is, the US is stands at number 28, with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people

Digging further deep, Puerto Rico stands at first position the world’s table for arms murders, statistics put all killings at 94.8 percent, which is tailed by Sierra Leone in Africa and Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean.

The deep wounds of World War I & II are still fresh; if one looks back and reads unbiased account of these two ghastly acts of human being, one can easily understand that the only motive behind these two wars were, only to get superiority or to get financial gain.

Hitler and his followers carried guns for what they called their cause. Now, the world calls every German a Nazi, which is a matter of disrespect for many peace loving Germans. The French revolution has its own crying stories. If Muslims from any part of the World carry guns (whatever is the motive behind) we call them terrorists, such prejudicial approach pushes the Muslim world in further isolation.

One alarming issue in the contemporary era is the world’s unipolar state, which means power supremacy in single hand; such state is idealized to graft another world war. The biggest mistake Asian countries have done, especially Pakistan, for helping the US to push back Russians (formerly known as USSR) from Afghanistan. That mistake led this world from bipolar state to unipolar power-state.

The Pakistani establishment wore the crown after tearing down the USSR with the help of benevolent CIA. What happened after that? It’s a dismayed image; generations got brutally destroyed in Afghanistan & Pakistan, damaging the economy and infrastructures.

After the Afghan war (post 80’s) gun culture is on high rise in Pakistan; no one ever feels secure here.  Gun owners are not ashamed; rather owning a gun is a symbol of pride for them. People having passion for guns would worry more about not owning one or the new one, but not about the education of their children or the condition of their home economy.

A father (especially in the tribal area) can easily afford weapons, which normally cost more than PKR 1,00,000 but they never send their children to school, which hardly costs them few hundred rupees. And if there is anyone among them who manages to go to school or (God forbid) to college they became directional literate. This presents a pretty dangerous and grim picture of the so-called nation.

One can read the original post on Mountaintv