Praveen’s lawyer Nandkumar Rajurkar, who said his client is mentally unstable. (Fotocorp)

April 23: Praveen Mahajan was not licensed to kill but he had the licence to keep the .32 Browning automatic with which he pumped three bullets into his brother.

A small-time contractor, Praveen is not the only unlikely possessor of firearms in the country. Guns are increasingly becoming a coveted toy of the rich and the powerful, according to security experts and criminologists.

Guns have now become a must-have for some to show off their aggressiveness, former CBI director Joginder Singh said in Delhi. “A weapon gives a sense of power to a person much more than his physical power.”

A case in point is the murder of model Jessica Lal. Psychologist Sanyal said Jessica’s alleged killer, Manu Sharma, “was in the habit of keeping a weapon. It was a game for him”.

“The same is also known to be true in Salman Khan’s case, though he killed animals,” Shubra Sanyal, a psychologist with the National Institute of Criminology and Forensic Sciences, said.

“There is a need for strict vigilance to check the trafficking of these illegal weapons,” said forensic expert J.K. Kaushik. A firearm, like a revolver, “is a very handy weapon, which can be hidden easily. Most of these that are possessed by people today are unlicensed which increases the need for immediate checks”, the forensic expert added.

Delhi police officers, however, claimed that licensing procedures “are very stringent”.

But in Praveen’s case, the procedures do not appear to have been stringent. He was given the firearm licence by Maharashtra police in 1996, the same year his brother-in-law Gopinath Munde became home minister of the state. Munde is married to Pradnya, one of the two sisters of Pramod and Praveen.

An annual review by Delhi police has pointed out that “the availability of illicit firearms and their use is becoming a problem with every passing year. This is no longer merely a police problem. If firearms were not so easily available, many heinous crimes would not have been committed”.

“The illicit trafficking in small arms is a transnational phenomenon that requires transnational solutions. A total of 7,975 cases under the Arms Act were registered last year,” the Delhi police review said.

According to Singh, Delhi alone has “around 60,000 licensed revolvers”. But the number of people keeping illegal revolvers “would be at least 10 times more”, he added.