February 21, 2012
By Robert W. Hunnicutt
A great number of the fancy British shotguns and double rifles now on the market came out of India in the early 1970s when the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi outlawed hunting and imposed strict gun controls. Gun control, of course, didn't prevent Gandhi from being shot to death by her own bodyguards in 1984.
As has been abundantly demonstrated in nations like Jamaica and Mexico, gun control works in inverse proportion to how badly people want them, and in India, people want them quite a bit.
I had always thought guns were almost impossible to have in India until an old acquaintance, 1976 Olympic gold medalist Lanny Bassham, started coaching an Indian brother and sister in smallbore rifle. "You can have a gun in India?" I asked. "You can if you have money," was Bassham's answer.
And now that there's more money in India, there are more guns, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times . http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-india-guns-20120221,0,2480184,full.story
All that Marharishi peace and love stuff seems to be wearing off, thanks to the rarity of police officers and high-profile attacks like the one in Mumbai carried out by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2008.
"All that Gandhi stuff is for tourists," said one man quoted by the Times . "They should go off to Varanasi, see the holy cows."
