When I visited Pakistan several years ago I was struck by how every business seemed to have an armed guard. In Lahore the Pizzeria Uno had three armed guards in front. The doorman held a shotgun in his right hand as he opened the door with his left hand. Even the McDonald’s had a fellow with an AK-47 sitting on a folding chair in front. Imagine blathering on to these people about gun control!
Now the Wall Street Journal reports that gun ownership is spreading throughout the middle class. When the government can’t, or won’t, protect you, what other choice do you have?
After escaping kidnappers who chained him to a bed for 25 days, Mohammad Javed Afridi pressed Pakistani law enforcement for swift justice. The police offered him something else: temporary permits for four automatic assault rifles.
Since Mr. Afridi’s ordeal ended in mid-October, police in his hometown of Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan, haven’t made an arrest in his case. They raided the kidnappers’ hide-out, but the captors got away, a senior Peshawar police official says.
So the cops allowed Mr. Afridi to arm himself against future abductions. The 35-year-old journalist now carries an AK-47 to work and back home to his wife and five children. Relatives rotate duty as his bodyguards. If his car is again stopped by armed men on a dark road, Mr. Afridi vows to shoot first.
“I’m not going through that again,” he said in an interview in this city in northeastern Pakistan.
Guns have long been part of Pakistan’s traditional culture, especially in the rugged northwestern part of the country. Handed down through generations, rifles have been used for hunting and for firing celebratory fusillades. Now, however, modern assault rifles and handguns have come into vogue among middle-class Pakistanis, and gun registration has jumped.
And the Left thinks it is bad here!
