Opposing government plans to take away the gun-owning rights of law-abiding citizens was an opportunity for South Africans to ‘start making our democracy work for us’, said Paul Oxley, chairman of Gun Owners South Africa, in a livestream debate hosted by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) last night.
But this meant that ‘somebody has to stand up and make that difference’. It would be ‘difficult’, but all South Africans, whether gun owners or not, who were ‘concerned about limitations to our right to life … have to stand up, and be brave.’
Oxley was one of four guests in the hour-and-a-half livestream discussion, hosted by IRR Head of Campaigns, Gabriel Crouse. The other participants were Tshepi Mmekwa, an advocate for women’s gun rights, Andrew Soutar, gun rights activist, and Jonathan Fouché, chairman of the South African Arms and Ammunition Dealers’ Association.
The event forms part of the IRR’s campaign to resist the ban on guns for self-defence proposed in the Firearms Control Amendment Bill, now before Parliament.
Oxley said of the government’s justification for the bill – that it would enable the police ‘to maintain public order’: ‘This is police state 101 … that’s frightening. This is a red flag.’
Firearms were important ‘because they are a critical totem of liberty’.
The right to life and the right to defend that life ‘is not something a government can grant or take away. From our point of view, this is a bellwether for society and whether a government can be trusted’.
He added: ‘Why are they planning to take away firearms? Probably because they are planning to do something they should be shot for.’
Jonathan Fouché pointed out that the ‘draconian’ measure would ‘kill’ the arms and ammunition trade. ‘If this goes through, this trade will be killed, and there are hundreds of thousands in this trade … who will simply lose their jobs and livelihoods.’
Noting that surveys indicated that ‘firearms are used about eight times more as a deterrent than when a shot is fired’, Fouché said: ‘Firearms in society in the hands of law-abiding, responsible people are a benefit to the safety of the public.’
Fouché said his association was ‘trying to move forward in a sensible way to open dialogue so that we can start engaging meaningfully on how to improve the situation in the country’.
He argued that Parliament’s portfolio committee on police should play the leading role in addressing the grave deficiencies at the Central Firearms Registry and in establishing ‘better dialogue’ with the authorities.
Tshepi Mmekwa said that, as a woman, a wife and a mother, ‘the issue is around being capable of defending myself and not waiting for a knight in shining armour. When trouble happens, I am the family’s first responder’.
‘It is important as a woman to take control of any situation I am in. I do not take firearms lightly. We practise, and it’s important for me as a woman in South Africa to do everything in my power to defend myself, my family and my loved ones.’
She added: ‘Women in South Africa are being slaughtered … but the police do nothing’.
She believed there was something ‘sinister’ about the bill. ‘It goes beyond laziness to deal with crime … it makes me uneasy. If we do not do anything about it, we are heading down a rabbit hole, and that’s not good.’
When Crouse put it to her that the government and Gun-Free SA argued that taking guns away would make women safer, Mmekwa said: ‘That argument makes me fume. If you take away the tool for a woman to protect herself, what must she use? A feather? A broom? I have no chance against a man who is 100kg, and 1.8m tall. With a firearm, I level the playing field.’
Andrew Soutar focused attention on the shambolic state of the Central Firearms Registry, an office ‘that bears all the hallmarks of a rogue unit of apartheid days’, which routinely ignored court orders, failed administratively and ‘does not communicate with anyone’.
‘The only way we get to talk to them is through the courts, which is slow and cumbersome.’
Soutar also highlighted the controversy over police being found to have supplied thousands of firearms to gangs, weapons which had been linked to more than 1 000 murders.
All in all, the evidence was ‘overwhelming’ that the police were ‘not fit to apply the existing Act, never mind new restrictions’.
He added that that the reality was that South Africa had the second highest murder rate per capital in the world, just behind Venezuela, and far higher than most war zones, and, despite there being ‘a number of hard-working police officers, ‘we know we cannot rely on the police’.
Oxley said he was encouraged by the groundswell of opposition. In generating ‘general opprobrium and outrage’, uniting so many across the country, Bheki Cele ‘has managed to do something few have managed in decades’.
If the measure could not be defeated politically through protests, campaigns and petitions, three separate legal teams were ‘revving up’ to contest it in court.
Crouse, speaking as a non-gun owner, said was he ‘extremely concerned about the ramifications of this bill for the country’, and echoed Oxley’s advice in saying: ‘We must stand up, and be brave, and put our ideas forward to make things better … to stop one of the most insane ideas to be presented by the government.’
That was ‘a high bar’ – against the threat of expropriation without compensation, National Health Insurance, and prescribed assets – ‘but to propose that guns not be permitted for self-defence is beyond the pale.’
*New research by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) exposes gaping holes in the arguments for taking away the gun-owning rights of law-abiding citizens.
The research is contained in the report, ‘Don’t Add Chaos to Disorder: exposing the weakness of key civilian disarmament arguments’, authored by senior IRR analyst Nicholas Lorimer, and presented by IRR CEO Dr Frans Cronje at the Gun Summit organised by the Democratic Alliance on Tuesday.