The Civilian Secretariat for Police Service has committed to table the Firearms Control Amendment Bill in Parliament by the end of March 2027. According to the draft that circulated in November 2025, the Bill would tighten limits on civilian ownership, widen the minister’s discretion over who may own a firearm, and remove self-defence as a reason to hold a licence.
The Secretariat told Parliament earlier this year that it had commissioned research on whether firearm crime comes from gaps in the law or from the state’s failure to enforce the law it has. Marco van Niekerk, group chief executive of Outdoor Investment Holdings, pointed out in News24 on 28 October that the Secretariat’s 2025/26 annual report mentions only a short research brief. It does not say whether this is the promised research or when full findings will be published.
The Bill is therefore being prepared before the research that is meant to justify it. And stricter limits on licensed owners do nothing about guns that leave the state’s hands.
Between April 2019 and March 2024, the police lost or had stolen 3,433 of their own firearms. The police minister, Firoz Cachalia, told Parliament that only 559 had been recovered. That leaves 2,874 guns unaccounted for. In 2023/24 alone, 741 went missing. By the time of the reply, the police had recovered 170 of them.
Only 212 of the 3,433 were lost through negligence. The rest were stolen or taken in robberies. A separate parliamentary reply, reported in January 2024, linked 1,066 murders since 2016 to police-issued firearms.
Licensed owners lose guns too, but most of those guns come back. Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane, a researcher at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, told an Institute for Security Studies seminar in October 2024 that about 60% of the 63,500 licensed firearms lost or stolen between 2013 and 2023 were recovered. She said the recovery rate for police-issued firearms was significantly lower.
The police are not the only state body that loses firearms. Ms Irish-Qhobosheane estimates that 502 state entities own about 2.2 million firearms, and that about 1,800 are lost or stolen every year. Only the police report their losses, and the police and the army own less than 30% of the total.
The state also loses track of guns it holds as evidence. She said Bheki Cele, then police minister, acknowledged that at least 357 firearms vanished from evidence stores between April 2020 and November 2023. She says 178 of them went missing from Norwood police station, and the loss came to light only when detectives from another station followed up on a weapon used in a cash-in-transit heist.
The registry that should help is not reliable either. Freddy Hlungwani of the Gauteng Department of Community Safety told the same seminar that, during a departmental evaluation, staff at the Central Firearms Registry could not say how many firearms they process each month. He also said some recovered firearms were recorded in the registry as destroyed.
The Bill has been before the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) since August 2025. Nedlac’s deliberations are closed. Mr van Niekerk says Nedlac has not consulted his company, which is the largest firearms importer and retailer. The police ministry told Parliament in a written reply that the drafting team held several consultation sessions with industry stakeholders. I could find no published list of who attended.
The 2021 version of the Bill was withdrawn after public objection. Ian Cameron, the Democratic Alliance (DA) member of Parliament who chairs the police committee, says the current text is the same. He wrote in Daily Maverick on 26 October that his party will oppose the Bill in Parliament and challenge it in court if necessary.
Cabinet must approve the Bill before it can be tabled. DA ministers sit in that Cabinet. They would have to approve a Bill that the chair of Parliament’s police committee has vowed to fight. Once the Bill reaches his committee, he sets up the programme for public hearings.
The government should publish the Secretariat’s research and the list of those consulted at Nedlac before it tables anything. It should also report every quarter how many police firearms were lost, stolen and recovered, and what it has done about each loss.
A state that cannot say where its own guns are, has no standing to ask more of people who are licensed and can be traced. Until it can, it should not ask Parliament for new rules.
[Image: https://www.saps.gov.za/newsroom/thumbnail.php?f=63560]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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