Deadly Kite Festival Includes Slashed Throats, Electrocutions

LAHORE, Pakistan — An annual kite festival in eastern Pakistan has left at least 11 people dead.

My first thought when I saw this was that a group of extremists attacked the kite festival, believing that it was a kike festival.

Officials say two died after their throats were cut by metal kite strings. Kite flyers often use string made of wire or coated with ground glass to try to cut the strings of rivals or damage other kites.

Who’s flying these kites, rival prison gangs?

The festival is also often marked with celebratory gunshots fired into the air. Five people died after being hit by stray bullets. Two people were electrocuted when they tried to untangle kites from overhead power cables.

It sounds like these people need to spend a little less time flying kites, and more time learning how to fire a gun into the air without killing someone.

Two others fell from roofs. One was a boy chasing a stray kite. Another was a woman trying to stop her son from going after a kite.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times, there are at least a dozen better methods of stopping a child from going after a kite than pushing him off a roof, including hitting him in the kneecaps with a little bat, pepper spray, and using a lasso.

Police arrested more than 700 people during this year’s festival for using sharpened kite strings or firing guns. Officials say they also seized more than 280 illegally held weapons.

700 people? The US Army arrested less people when we invaded Afghanistan, at least officially that is.