The price of a bullet

What happens when you shoot someone? This might be a rhetorical question given how the majority of us haven’t had the curse of holding a gun, let alone, shoot someone. That isn’t the case in a country like the USA where owning weapons is facilitated by the Constitution itself. So much so, every year, domestic gun violence kills more Americans than terrorism or even the ongoing proxy wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, younameit) combined. That’s the downside of having a society where guns are common. India, for all its shortcomings, should be proud—at least for now—of its dissociation with guns in the civic sense. We leave the weapons to the experts (read: police force and the army). However, there is no guarantee that we might eventually culminate into a society that would fall madly in love with triggers. After all, don’t we follow Umreeka, albeit 25-30 years late, without fail? In my opinion, we should follow South Korea as far as gun control is concerned. There’s a reason why Korean movies, no matter how violent, seldom feature guns. Which is why you’ll see characters fighting it out raw with sickle, hammer, knife, etc. At the end of the day, nothing good ever came out of weapons, especially when they fell into the hands of civilians. The stone-pelters in Kashmir might be demanding Shariah but the reason they stick to stones is their lack of access to guns. Not that stones and pellets will solve anything (as if anybody’s interested in a solution up there) imagine the kind of trouble up north if kids who should be studying are pulling triggers instead. Once you pull it, there’s no going back. Once the bullet passes through a human body, you are tainted for life. It doesn’t matter whether you killed a terrorist or an ‘innocent’ on the street. You’ll never recover from it. And this is something i’m not imagining. It’s proven track record for all the so-called macho men who love wearing a holster. They shoot to kill for a living but when the time comes to sleep, they find it very difficult to close their eyes. The ones they killed don’t let them rest in peace. The conscience they abandoned during combat begins to nibble on their mind. It must be a terrible place. No wonder they cry inconsolably when they finally talk about their experiences with violence. Of course, psychiatrists would neither tell you this nor drop names the way their clients dropped humans.