An International Human Right?

I would have said the chances are slim, but even the Washington Post is covering the possibility of a gun rights movement in India:

When gunmen attacked 10 sites in Mumbai in November 2008, including two five-star hotels and a train station, Mumbai resident Kumar Verma sat at home glued to the television, feeling outraged and unsafe.

Before the end of December, Verma and his friends had applied for gun licenses. He read up on India’sgun laws and joined the Web forum Indians for Guns. When he got his license seven months later, he bought a black, secondhand, snub-nose Smith & Wesson revolver with a walnut grip.

It’ll be interesting if India turns out to be a major front in the international battle to get other governments to recognize their people have the right to effective tools needed to defend their lives and liberty against predation, like we saw in the Mumbai attacks.

3 thoughts on “An International Human Right?”

  1. Rather fitting that a gun rights movement would start up in India, given how anti-gun the British have been in the past as a result of attempting to keep their former empire under control.

    ‘‘Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.’’
    — Mahatma Ghandi, “Gandhi, An Autobiography”, page 446

  2. That’s a really interesting story. National Geographic did a piece on “untouchables” a couple years ago–the people that officially no longer exist as a caste but of course still do. One of the interesting bits in the article was the use of other lethal and non-lethal weapons–primarily acid–in keeping the untouchables down. The difficulty in getting firearms did nothing to prevent vigilantism, but it did prevent the oppressed from defending themselves, especially when outnumbered or facing mobs.

  3. A “human right”, I’d argue, is by definition,”international” —Americans aren’t the only humans!! Just because a particular government may not acknowledge it (or may outright trample it) does not mean a right doesn’t exist.

    (U.S. Politicians—Please take note.)

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