Daily Times

Sir: Recently, there was a report about some young men in Lahore who were involved in a public gunfight over a girl. According to the news story, two young men were out with their girlfriends when another pair of boys appeared with their bodyguards and opened fire on them after some heated words. The young men who were the targets responded with firing of their own and, by the end of it, one of the boys and his bodyguard were dead while the others were taken to hospital. The police arrested one of them as he tried to flee the scene. That young men roam around with armed guards is a fact that has received a fair amount of attention after several incidents involving armed guards shooting unarmed bystanders, sometimes apparently on a whim. Now these hooligans apparently have no compunction about guns and use them for the most trivial reasons.
What kind of families and homes do these boys come from, giving their children guns, guards and limited mental capacity? This seems like a recipe for disaster and shows us the kind of people who have money and power in this country. i.e. the kind that do not deserve it. I do not say that the death of a young man is not sad but the tragedy here is that of our society, which has been overtaken by violent criminals whose children follow in their fathers’ footsteps. This is the comeuppance of decades of corruption, black money and no morals.
ATTIYA AHMAD
Karachi