Gun ownership laws failing. Time for change.
Gun ownership in South Africa is always going to be touchy subject. One I find myself jumping for the fence a lot. Given my family lost a good friend to a hijacking many years back, I tend towards the ‘no guns’ idea. But on the other hand, no one wants to be caught in a gun-fight with fists as your only weapon. Gideon Joubert, recently submitted an open letter to government, calling for relaxed gun control, which generated some lively debate. In a follow up piece, Joubert once again questions government’s stance on gun ownership following the recent National Dialogue on Crime and Violence. Joubert says Police Minister Nathi Nhleko has got it wrong, again. – Stuart Lowman
The Minister of Police, Nathi Nhleko, made a few eyebrow raising statements at the National Dialogue on Crime and Violence held in Boksburg last weekend. Among them was his claim that due to some unspecific loophole in the law, individual gun owners can licence an unlimited number of firearms for sport shooting purposes. As an example the Minister then said “you find one individual with almost 5000 firearms and licences for sporting purposes. We need to find a way to address this.” These assertions made my jaw drop more than a little, and I frantically browsed through newspapers and media websites in a vain attempt to confirm that the Minister was misquoted. The endeavour proving fruitless, I contacted the Chairman of Gun Owners of South Africa (GOSA) and several sport shooting organisations in order to gauge their opinion on the matter. Suffice to say, they were as surprised at these claims as I was.
There is not a single individual private gun owner in South Africa that possesses even remotely close to 5000 firearms, and this includes collectors. The only possible reasonable explanation for this claim by Minister Nhleko is that because security companies licence their firearms under Section 20 of the FCA, he must have confused a large private security company’s holdings of licensed firearms with those of a private individual. I say reasonable explanation, because the alternative reason would be that the Minister is fibbing.
With regards to Minister Nhleko’s claim that people can licence unlimited firearms for sporting purposes, I would like to request of him to familiarize himself with the ridiculous amount of specious licence refusals by the Central Firearms Registry since June of this year.
Dedicated sport shooters have had hundreds of licence applications refused for the flimsiest of reasons, resulting in many of them being unable to participate in leagues and competitions for which they bought their firearms in the first place. One of my own applications being among those refused for irrational reasons, I was prevented from participating in a league shoot in August.
The problem has become so serious, that GOSA has been obligated to set-up a separate legal team specifically tasked to look into these refusals and provide assistance with appeals against them, and possible legal action in the event that the appeal fails. It is thus completely untrue that sport shooters are able to just willy-nilly licence as many weapons as they desire, and even if it were the case very few would be able to afford more than a handful anyway; sporting firearms are expensive.
Minister Nhleko then said that “there is a belief in our society that if you own a gun you are safe. But you are not. Anybody who has undergone military training will know that once the other side draws first and you still have your gun in your holster, you are as good as not having it.” I fully agree that owning a gun doesn’t make you any safer than purchasing a magic talisman from a palm reader. It is after all the competent and responsible person wielding the gun that makes the difference: the firearm itself is merely a defensive tool.
Hosea 7:11
“So Ephraim has become like a silly dove, without sense; they call to Egypt, they go to Assyria”
(They call to wicked governments, the UN)
