On July 5, 2026, Group Captain Asim Tariq of the Pakistan Air Force was shot and killed in Islamabad while attempting to stop an abduction. His death underscores the failure of Pakistan's arms licensing regime, which disarms law-abiding citizens while criminals easily access black-market automatic weapons.
Official Crime Statistics Mask Reality
Police claim Islamabad grew 36% safer in the first half of 2026, but this statistic is misleading. Mobile snatching and armed robbery remain daily occurrences. Open-source reporting reveals a gap between citizen e-tag complaints and registered First Information Reports. The official decline measures bureaucratic reluctance, not public safety.
Widespread Unlicensed Firearms
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, meaning at least 38 million weapons remain unregistered. The state does not control guns; it controls paperwork.
Regulatory Framework and Discretionary Privileges
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, the Ministry of Interior suspended new prohibited-bore licences for ordinary citizens.
Today, these lethal automatic licences flow to a narrow circle of parliamentarians, judges, senior bureaucrats, and officials. The general public is excluded. In one five-year period, the Sindh government alone issued 400,000 arms licences. The National Assembly reportedly accumulated 59,000 licences, averaging nearly two per member. Parliament as a body holds more than 69,000 prohibited-bore licences. With weak policing capacity, it is implausible that 400,000 licences followed genuine background checks, or that none reached the mafias the system was meant to restrain.
Constitutional and Legal Violations
This bifurcated framework hollows out the right of private defence recognised in Sections 96 to 106 of the Pakistan Penal Code. When a criminal carries an automatic rifle and the state denies an ordinary citizen any comparable lawful means of defence, the Penal Code’s protections become rhetorical. The system violates Article 25(1) of the Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law. Under the Supreme Court’s test in Elahi Cotton Mills v. Federation of Pakistan, the state’s distinction lacks a rational nexus to public safety. It serves aristocratic privilege rather than regulation.
Corruption and Leakage in the System
In fragile regulatory environments, firearms registries leak. Poorly tracked state arsenals enable officers to rent service weapons to criminals off-duty. In 2017, a Karachi joint operation by Rangers and police dismantled a gang producing counterfeit arms licences. Three serving police officers were part of the syndicate. The machinery regulating licences was fabricating them. The process is centralised, opaque, and bribe-dependent. Political influence, shortcuts, and outright corruption shape outcomes. The system functions as a bureaucratic tollbooth where officials extract rent in exchange for authorising a basic right of self-defence.
Modern Alternatives: Traceability and Competency Checks
The state has stuck with a failed instrument while the world has moved to modern, more effective means. The UN Firearms Protocol of 2001 shifts the regulatory focus from restriction to traceability. Marking, digital record-keeping, and rapid tracing link crime guns to their origins and cut diversion into the black market. The Swiss model shows that high private ownership can coexist with public safety when licensing is objective and non-discretionary. Switzerland issues a Competency Licence first, requiring verified background checks, certified training, and psychological screening. Only then is a separate transfer or carry authorisation generated. Distributed ledger and blockchain technology can create tamper-proof records of every transaction and ballistic profile.
Potential Benefits of Reform
If Pakistan replaced its arms licensing with automated, non-discretionary competency checks and smart tracing, two shifts would follow immediately. First, the black-market smuggling premium would collapse. Discretionary bans force law-abiding citizens towards smuggled weapons. A zero-discretion check lowers the legal transaction cost of self-defence towards zero. Demand for weapons from Darra Adam Khel and similar markets shrinks. Unlicensed gunsmiths are compelled to register as formal manufacturers meeting international marking standards or exit. Capital moves from the untaxed shadow economy into audited channels.
Second, land mafias would lose their primary weapon. Armed groups use illegal weapons to seize plots, undermining property rights and deterring foreign investment. Linking a National Ballistic Database to the digital land registry changes the incentive. If a firearm discharges at a disputed site, the cartridge signature is scanned and uploaded, automatically freezing the property’s title deed. The weapon becomes a liability that destroys the property’s value. Land grabbing becomes economically unviable.
The Human Cost of Inaction
What happened on July 5 could have been avoided. The cost of archaic governance was the life of a fighter pilot. Group Captain Tariq’s death is the visible cost of a licensing regime that protects the state’s discretion more than it protects citizens.
Syed Ali Shehryar is a strategy consultant, a graduate of Pakistan’s National Security Workshop (NDU), and a Fulbright Scholar from New York University. He can be reached at shehryar@nyu.edu.
