Indians For Guns

Big on guns, Punjab holds India's 20% licences
Punjabis' love for guns is legendary, factored perhaps by Punjab being a border state. Even many popular Punjabi songs -- Inderjit Nikku's "Desi Gun", Jimmy Wraich's "Loaded Gun" and Raja Lalka's "Pistol" -- revolve around guns.

So, despite being merely 2.3% of the country's population, the state has nearly 20% of the total private licensed weapons in the country. This often results in incidents of road rage taking a violent turn.

Red-flagging the skewed firearm licensing in the state, Punjab's traffic adviser Navdeep Asija has pointed in his advisory note to the state government last week that 4.5 lakh arm licences have been issued to civilians in Punjab allowing them three firearms on a single licence. Therefore, it can be estimated that there are around 11 lakh firearms against 77,000-odd police personnel in the state. Even if there is one firearm per cop, the state police have just 7% of the total private licenced firearms in Punjab. Nearly 21 lakh private arms licences have been issued in India.

The advisory note has been placed on record of the Punjab and Haryana high court as part of an ongoing case on the traffic scenario to seek a ceiling on the number of private licences issued in the state.

Eleven of Punjab's 22 districts figured in the list of the top 50 districts in India with the maximum arms licences. These include Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Ferozepur, Hoshiarpur, Sangrur and Muktsar.

The border district of Gurdaspur, besides Bathinda and Ludhiana top the state with 36,294, 36,232 and 26,756 licences, respectively. Apart from landlords, politicians, property dealers and officers own weapons.

Punjab is at the third spot, next only to Uttar Pradesh (11.17 lakh licences) and Madhya Pradesh (2.75 lakh). "Neighbouring Rajasthan (1.67 lakh) and Haryana (1.12 lakh) have issued much lesser number of arms licences," said Asija.

Sources said though Punjab police planned to bring down the number of licences in the state, but such moves have proven futile as political influences often prevail while granting licences.

Punjab was among the bottom four states in the rate of violent crimes in 2014. While the national average was 26.6, Punjab had 17.2 violent crimes per one lakh population.