THIS refers to the report ‘Biden urges gun control after shooter kills 19 children at Texas school’ (May 26). The tragedy took place not long after the horrific incident in which an 18-year-old white gunman had shot 10 people dead in a Buffalo supermarket in New York. Buffalo is the second largest city in the state of New York, where in a bloody racist attack, the teenager, influenced by a white supremacist ideology, known as the ‘replacement theory’, murdered in cold blood all those people, most of whom were black, in what is being considered one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.

It is a fact that two industries are flourishing in the United States much more than any other without due consideration by the government regarding public rights and security concerns. The two flourishing sectors are weapons and pharmaceutical industries.

One can have a fair idea about this and a true picture of the current status by a simple search on the internet that will show the billions of dollars that these two industries alone generate. The business is expanding with huge increase on an annual basis.

A law-abiding citizen anywhere in the world will always like to have a weapon-free society and less dependence on medicines. This is only logical. Arms must be for the use of armed forces to secure public rights as much as possible, and a healthy society will definitely be less dependent on medicines than is the case in the US.

If the US government fails to understand this simple logic, the country will continue to have such inhuman gory incidents.

Khalid Mustafa
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, May 29th, 2022