In a country awash in weapons, running a legal gun shop is a tough business.

Byline: Taimoor Hassan

A report published by Small Arms Survey, a research project at the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, in June 2018 estimated that civilians in 230 countries till year end 2017 owned 857 million firearms. What makes this number appalling is that it is 84.6% of the total number of guns in the world. Yes, militaries and law enforcement agencies do not own majority of the firearms, according to the survey.

Out of the over one billion firearms in the world, militaries hold 13.1% of the guns, which comes to 133 million, while law enforcement agencies hold a paltry 22.7 million guns, only 2.2%. The case of Pakistan is no different. The survey estimated that there were an estimated 43.9 million civilian-owned guns in Pakistan by the year end 2017, up from 18 million in 2007, much more than the estimates are for military-owned guns (2.3 million) and guns owned by law enforcement agencies (944,000), putting Pakistan at 4th spot for the highest civilian firearms holding, behind only the United States, India and China.

Forty-four million guns looks like a big business. A 9mm caliber pistol, which is the lowest caliber and the most demanded in Pakistan costs approximately Rs25,000 on the lower end of the price range. Of course, there are other, more expensive ones as well, depending on the manufacturer.

But given the fact that Rs25,000 is the cheapest a gun can get, that would mean that the total value of the 43.9 million guns in circulation in Pakistan is at least Rs1,098 billion, a highly conservative estimate.

And the market has been growing at about 9.3% per year for the past decade, according to data from the Small Arms Survey. Extrapolating from that growth rate, the country will have 52.5 million guns by the end of this calendar year. And next year, another 4.9 million guns will enter the Pakistan market, meaning annual small arms sales in Pakistan are worth at least Rs122 billion ($764 million) and may well be worth more than $1 billion a year.

To put that in context, that is more than the value of all motorcycles and rickshaws sold in Pakistan in a year.

But walk into the shops of firearms retailers in Lahore and you would find no customers and empty inventory. Dealers say that it has been six years of misery in their business. The downfall of their business began when the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N), led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took office in 2013. The anti-gun policies of the Nawaz Administration at the federal level, and the Shahbaz Administration in Punjab, curtailed arms imports, and banned licenses, all in a bid to regulate the...