To be honest, I don’t like guns, even hunting rifles for that matter.
This is mostly because, first, I don’t like wildlife hunting, and, second and more importantly, I don’t take lightly what it would actually mean to shoot someone, to be the cause of ending somebody else’s life. It is a terrible thought. This is therefore not a topic I imagined I would write about. However, along with my colleagues at the IRR, I am alarmed by the proposal in the Firearms Control Amendment Bill “to provide that no firearm licences may be issued for self-defence purposes” (Government Gazette, vol. 671, 21 May 2021, no.44593, page 2).
All South Africans, non-gun-keen or otherwise, should care about draft legislation that will seek to do away with the right to lawfully own a firearm for self-defence. More than that, all South Africans should #StopSelf-DefenceGunBan now. Thousands of people have already used our portal to submit this letter opposing the amendment. You can add your voice by clicking here.
Crime is on the rise, and many of us are protected by guns
One of the strange aspects of modern city life is that you don’t have to become a vegan to be spared having to kill and pluck your own chicken – you can select it from a supermarket fridge, all clean and tidied up. In the same way, however much I dislike violence, I live in a house with a board outside that states that the property is protected by a private security company. This means that, like so many South Africans, I am protected by guns whether or not I personally intend to use one. And we need this protection because crime is on the rise.
This is not the first time the government has sought to tighten its control of citizens’ firearm licences. When the Firearms Control Act (FCA) was implemented in 2004, firearm owners were required to relicense their weapons over a period of five years. However, as we point out in our submission to the Civilian Secretariat of Police Service, ‘in the period between then and now the Government has been forced to admit that its efforts in relicensing legal guns have been beset by backlogs, delays, and disorder…More than 8 million motor vehicles are relicensed annually without too much trouble. Yet the police’s bureaucracy has been thrown into chaos in trying to administer the estimated 4.5 million licensed firearms in South Africa.’
Furthermore, while the Bill was supposed to address South Africa’s high levels of violent crime, South African Police Service (SAPS) statistics for the period between 2004/2005 to 2019/2020 show that levels of armed robbery of vehicles, businesses, and homes have increased by 46.1%, 522%, and 125% respectively. And murders have increased by 13.5% over the same period.
Banning gun licences for self-defence would especially affect people living in rural areas, particularly farmers, who are made vulnerable by the great distances between properties. From our own reporting on events at Senekal and Newcastle, as well as the reporting of other news outlets, it is apparent that rural crime – especially relating to stock theft – is an issue that affects both black and white farmers and farm employees.
In an Eyewitness News report, one black farmer described how the theft of 15 sheep and six cows resulted in a R400 000 loss for him. He also claimed that a policeman investigating his case was caught taking stolen cattle, evidently to be sold in Johannesburg. In the same report, a female farmer told of the trauma of being attacked by one of her male farm workers. Horrific violence, such as the murder of Brendin Horner (which seems to have been deliberately cruel and violent), strikes fear and anger into many farmers, who find themselves up against hardened criminals. It would be plainly immoral not to allow them firearms for self-defence.
A significant factor is the inability or even unwillingness of the police to respond with sufficient resolve. Daily Friend writer Gabriel Crouse’s reporting on the deaths of the Coka brothers in Piet Retief highlighted investigating officer Warrant Officer Vukile David Nhlapho’s conceding that the brothers ‘would be alive today if police had responded promptly to a request for help from farmers’.
What’s really going on here?
There can be no good reason to take away gun licences for self-defence unless the police force is efficient in protecting citizens – which it is not. And even if they were efficient, if government had too much control and power over citizens, it would be easy for the country to become a police state in which citizens became increasingly powerless in relation to the government. We are already struggling to hold our government to account for corruption and abuse. The police force is itself an example of widespread corruption and mismanagement committed by those with power entrusted to them by the state.
Moreover, curbing legitimate firearm rights doesn’t make sense – the guns used in crime are not legally owned. If they were registered, they would be traceable. No person planning to commit a crime or heist would, as law-abiding citizens do, register their weapon in their name. It therefore doesn’t make sense to go after the people who are registering their guns, and thus are accountable to society for what they do with them.
This amendment to the FCA would create a situation in which citizens were increasingly vulnerable to illegally armed criminals. It could even be argued that it would make things easier for criminals because they would be guaranteed less resistance by an unarmed population.
Our read on what is really going on is that the state is attempting to use legislation to evade responsibility for South Africa’s crime levels, and, instead, implicating law-abiding gun owners (despite the onerous training and background-check processes that precede the granting of their firearm licences). By attempting to fool the public into believing that rising crime levels are the fault of a third party, the state hopes to diminish public pressure for it to address the causes of crime, and deal with the actual criminals.
A more honest place to start: Illegal use of police firearms
In a report to Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police, tabled on 2 March, the Auditor-General found that SAPS had understated the number of ‘lost, stolen and illegal’ firearms, and ‘overstated’ the number of identifiable stolen (or lost) SAPS firearms recovered.
Specifically with regard to the surrender of weapons, he indicated that SAPS management, processes and systems were inadequate, and that there were insufficient internal controls in the protocols for capturing and reviewing data from dockets. As stated in our submission, there is no record of the extent to which police and military firearms are used in house robberies, nor any comparison of this with firearms illegally imported from Mozambique, or with legally owned hunting rifles. Regarding statistics on the actual number of licensed firearms in the country, the IRR noted: ‘The cited figures are at best an estimate based on unsatisfactory police records.’ There simply are no reliable data, or records, for licensed or unlicensed firearms. Regarding data on mortality, no distinction is made ‘between a homeowner shot dead by a robber and a robber shot dead by a homeowner’.
Furthermore, corruption in the police force is a key worry. The IRR’s 2011 report, Broken Blue Line: the Involvement of the South African Police Force in Serious and Violent Crime in South Africa, found that:
- The South African Police Service has been infiltrated by criminal elements.
- Police officers, often in uniform and in state vehicles, commit significant numbers of serious and violent crimes, from cash-in-transit heists, to ATM robberies, armed business and house robberies, murders, and rapes.
- Police officers are seldom held to account for criminal behaviour, with such a small fraction being prosecuted that it leads to suspicions that they are protected from criminal sanction.
- A significant proportion of police officers have criminal records but remain in the service of the state.
- Police officers in South Africa are often a serious threat to the safety, lives, and liberty of South Africans.
The point is that the state should allocate existing resources to getting their own affairs in order before criminalising citizens for assuming responsibility for protecting themselves. The police track record doesn’t, thus far, inspire trust and the feeling that proposed gun laws are indeed in the best interests of citizens.
Regain the trust of South Africans
As we emphasise in our submission, ‘(it) is not the people, but the government who are responsible for the violence and mayhem that play out across South African society’. The government and police force should work to regain the trust of South Africans by addressing the corruption, mismanagement and irregularities in their ranks. As importantly, they should work with South Africans to promote security in our country, rather than criminalising and threatening the civil liberties of law-abiding citizens.
A good first step would be to account for all missing police firearms.
The IRR is driving a lobby to stop the draft legislation that will ban guns for self-defence and needs your help.
You can submit this letter opposing the draft amendment to the Civilian Secretariat for Police Service (CSPS) here. The CSPS must, by law, consider all submissions.
#StopSelf-DefenceGunBan, make your voice heard.
[Photo: by John Moore/Getty Images]
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