“To help ease Wasil back toward normalcy, deputy police chief Khan put the family up in his guarded guesthouse, gave them a monthly stipend, and arranged for Wasil to attend a nearby school. Khan also removed the boy’s sidearm. ‘The pistol is our enemy,’ he told me. ‘When you have a pistol, you are a target, you are in the fight.'” – from The Life and Death of Wasil, the Taliban-Hunting Child Warrior [via gq.com]

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

33 COMMENTS

  1. When you have a pistol, you are a target, you are in the fight

    Chief Khan should toss his pistol. That way he’ll be safe.

    • I hope this sub human is raped to death…I am not joking at all…….Disarming a solider or freeman is treason and an act of evil.

  2. With or without a sidearm, if somebody REALLY wants to kill you, you’re dead unless you have presidential level secret service protection.
    Perhaps Wasil could have returned fire after getting shot the first time, and perhaps it would have saved him from getting shot in the head, but I don’t think there was any serious chance of Wasil dying of old age.

    • If someone who is really competent, and is not considered about being killed or captured wants you dead, then you have a problem.

      • I suspect his killers were there specifically to execute HIM.

        OTOH, it’s a dangerous area, it’s always possible (but I’m guessing it’s not likely) he was just a random target of opportunity.

    • ^^^^This.

      And the whole idea of “No guns for you!” is to take you out of the fight(*) … they hate citizens having guns for the symbolism, of having agency to shape your life and world. This is why no impact arguments ever work. It’s not about the results on violence, or anything else, of having guns. It’s about the result of owning your own power, your own life, n making your own choices. Once someone chooses to take up a gun, or any other kind of agency, they’ve already lost.

      (*)The big fight, not any contest of violence within it. The struggle of life. The entire goal is to take from others their choices in the world. At root, the Taliban and US civilian disarmers have the same goal.

      This is exactly same as “unlimited direct democracy”, also known as gum-flapping overlords insisting that 4 million useful idiots in California should give them the authority to tell people in Wyoming to do things the way the Californians will vote for.

  5. Check out this gem from the end of the article:

    “He’s 8 now, and he’s been consumed by one thought. ‘I want to kill the Taliban who killed my father,’ he told me shyly. Barakzai hadn’t yet taken him to the firing range, but that day, he said, was not far off. ‘I’m buying plastic guns for the boy,’ he told me, ‘so that he will be ready.'”

    Don’t you see? Plastic guns and firing ranges lead to child soldiers and dead children!!!

    • Dam right it does. The anti gunners need to be reminded, in that part of the world your being hunted.

      Wonder how long Bloomberg and Shannon would last with the Taliban?

  6. Well, the ‘kids’ are a bit sharper than the ‘rents’ make ’em out to be.

    Thanks to ‘Hollywood’ and the first-person shooter game industry, they know guns have no evil in them, just the person who chooses to do evil with them.

    Thanks to the recent election, I’m cautiously optimistic the direction gun rights are going.

    ‘The Kids Are Alright’ – The Who (1979)

  9. One bad ass little Dude, you knew from the opener it wasn’t gonna end well.

    It did spark a thought for me though as far so ROE goes, “the enemy you don’t kill, you leave for your children” is roughly the quote I believe.

      • It’s about time to do away with colleges. To hell with ’em. They cost $50,000 a year, they turn kids into safe-space-needing snowflakes, and after you run up $200,000 of debt you can’t get a job anyway.

        Seriously. ### college.

        • Colleges like any other Castle feeds itself by selling worthless degrees, funded by taxpayers and their parents.

        • Indeed. I’m 21 and I wasted a year of my life after high school in college (my folks didn’t give me a choice). Dropping out was the best decision I ever made; the whole damn thing is a racket. Even the useful stuff comes pre-packaged with a whole bunch of useless bullshit you have to pay for; God help you if you want a narrow specialization.

          The part that REALLY pisses me off though is that college is pressnted, by educators and parents, as a garaunteed gateway to success, as well as the ONLY path to success. I work in construction now (as a form-setter/concrete finisher), making good money and doing something I LOVE. Plus, it’s a skill I can get paid to use anywhere in the world.

          Of course, that would mean these special snowflakes would have to get their hands dirty and do work that is “beneath” them. Hell, the boys (I don’t care how old you are, if you can’t work with your hands, you are a boy, not a man) might even have to NOT get their nails done! The horror!

          Seriously though, all you have to do is look at the age makeup of the construction industry to see just how lazy my damn generation is. Out of about 45 total employees (the company I work for does dirt and concrete work), 3 of them are under 30. One of them is 28, another is 26, and I’m 21. And that’s far from unusual in the industry.

  10. Of the uncle: When the Americans arrived, three years before Wasil was born, Samad fought to repel them. He had battled invaders before—fighting the Soviets as a mujahideen warrior in the 1980s. Now, toiling for the Taliban, Samad buried IEDs in roads and under bridges and fashioned explosive vests for suicide attacks. Samad was a Taliban commander when Wasil was born—and as the boy grew, he became entranced with his uncle’s stories of courage and valor.

    Screw these people. My son has nearly died to IEDs in Afghanistan more than once. For nothing. These guys will flip sides faster than a half-cooked pancake. They’re all the enemy. We should leave them to their nasty sh*th*le of a country and never allow a single one of them into the U.S. If they cause problems, we should turn Kabul into a parking lot and leave. Repeat as necessary.

    • This.

      All cultures are not equal in value, achievement, potential, some people are bigger burdens, vote the wrong way for the wrong things, and we need to start keeping them out.

      Time for a modern 1924 Immigration Act, no more 3rd world immigration.

    • “I’m better than people who attacked civilian targets. To prove it, I’m going to attack even more civilian targets!”

    • agreed, there are difficulties to over come if you want to build a oil pipeline over radioactive slag, but once build, nobody will mess with it for about whatever the half life is of what we drop on it.

      • Whatever he did, and whatever his fate, we at TTAG can’t affect any of that.

        It’s their country, and short of imposing our will with unlimited military force, we’re not going to change anything in Afghanistan. In contrast to that requirement, the Obama administration made sure that some of our service members were disciplined for calling attention to old men buggering little boys.

        • Two laps around the marble and Gulf 1 under the belt, going back and living in ME for a year, I agree with you. There is nothing East of 28 degrees longitude worth dying for.

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