On July 5, 2026, Group Captain Asim Tariq of the Pakistan Air Force died in Islamabad. He was shot while trying to stop an abduction. A serving military officer, killed in a city that police claim grew safer by 36 per cent in the first half of this year.

That statistic is a lie told through omission. Mobile snatching and armed robbery remain daily occurrences. Open-source reporting reveals a gaping hole between citizen e-tag complaints and registered First Information Reports. The official decline measures bureaucratic reluctance, not public safety.

The problem is national. And the tool blamed is the wrong one. Pakistan’s arms licensing regime disarms law-abiding citizens while criminals bypass it entirely through black-market automatic weapons. The regulatory posture fails the basic legal test of proportionality.

Consider the numbers. Pakistan ranks sixth among 178 countries in private firearms ownership and is the third-largest importer globally. Roughly 43.9 million privately owned firearms circulate inside the country. Only one in ten is licensed. At least 38 million weapons remain unregistered. The state does not control guns. It controls paperwork.

Civilian ownership is governed by the Pakistan Arms Ordinance of 1965 and the Pakistan Arms Rules of 2023. Section 11 grants provinces authority over non-prohibited weapons while reserving prohibited bores, including automatic rifles and submachine guns, for the federal government. In 2017,........

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