Guns in Africa
A couple of good reads on guns and gun control in South Africa. The first:
Seven South African Police Service provincial commissioners were criticised sharply yesterday by members of Parliament’s safety and security committee for not knowing what was happening on the ground in their areas.
The seven had been called before the committee to report on the progress made in implementing the Firearms Control Act and its regulations.
From next year about 2-million legal firearm owners will have to begin reapplying for their licences. The project has already cost the state more than R63m.
Police have come under fire for the regulations relating to the act, and have been besieged by accusations that they will disarm the private security industry and do irreparable harm to the R2bn- a-year hunting industry.
Committee chairwoman Maggie Sotyu told the assembled commissioners from North West, Limpopo, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Free State, Northern Cape and Mpumalanga that the information they supplied to members of the committee was different to that which the committee had been given on the ground while on oversight visits.
Sounds like they’re taking a cue from Canada and implementing a registration scheme that will fail. The next article says the numbers don’t add up (sound familiar?):
The reality in SA is that 60% of all robberies involve the use of guns. About half of all murders in the country are committed with guns. There are 30 murders for every 100000 of the population each year, making us the secondhighest in the world.
And SA does not have huge numbers of legal guns because the majority of the population historically were denied the right to own guns what we have is racially skewed gun ownership.
The safety and security committee was told that only about 2million South Africans own about 4- million guns. That is less than 5%. Legal guns that is.
MPs were also told that in the past five years 176559 guns were destroyed. But there was another statistic that was pretty scary. In 1998 guns reported lost or stolen totalled 19507. This number has steadily decreased over the past six years, with 12216 guns reported lost or stolen this year so far. The scary part is that in 1998 the number found (either confiscated or recovered) came to 9384. This figure has steadily increased over the same six years, with 20234 guns found between January and August this year.
That means there were about 8000 more weapons found than were lost. Where on earth did they come from? If they were lost or stolen and not reported, why do the South African Police Service figures for prosecutions of those who have been negligent not reflect all these guns?
MPs were also told that this year, for instance, 48994 firearms were destroyed, but only 12000 were reported lost or stolen. Are we honestly being asked to believe more than 34000 legal gun owners failed to report that they had lost their weapons or had them stolen? So where did they come from?
You mean that a gun ban results in criminals obtaining guns illegally? Odd how that works. Additionally, roughly half of US households have guns and the murder rate is about 5.5 per 100,000. Why is that?
