APROPOS ‘How the system failed us’ (Sept 13) written by the mother of Amal Umer, whose life was violently stolen from her in the days following the recent elections in Pakistan, I am an American and this has moved me to such an extent that I feel it virtually impossible not to comment.

This is a story that feels all too familiar to me from events in my own country. The culture of firearms in the US is one that I struggle to understand.

According to reports on the incident, this wasn’t the sort of encounter that is often engineered by the police in order to take care of some perceived problem. Instead, it seems this was a case of the police responding to an urgent law enforcement issue. As anyone able to view these circumstances with clarity and honesty must admit, the use of military assault weapons by the notoriously underpaid police force greatly increases the risk of unintended casualties.

The graduate school at the University of Chicago is located in the Hyde Park neighbourhood on the city’s notorious south side. These neighbourhoods are some of the most violent and neglected in the US. And yet, the paucity of level-one trauma centres in this part of the city means that, very often, when someone is the victim of gun violence there, they must be transported to hospitals many miles away, and the time lost often makes the difference between life and death.

We learn from the study of evolutionary biology that one of the factors that led to the success of our species and its current dominance over the planet was our tendency to take care of each other. This, to this day, remains the hallmark of the greatest of human civilizations. What to think, then, when, in Pakistan, home to one of the earliest of all advanced civilizations, it seems that people in the very profession most dedicated to helping our fellow humans cannot be bothered to lift a finger to save the life of an innocent.

David E. Ford, Jr.
Washington DC, USA

Published in Dawn, September 21st, 2018