Mungo Soggot:A SECOND LOOK
In a letter to the Mail & Guardian last week, Willie Hofmeyr, African National Congress MP responded to an editorial, entitled “Ban guns, build jails, fire Sydney”, which discussed the lamentable state of law and order in South Africa.
Hofmeyr hit back by cataloguing the creation of “drastic anti-crime laws”, the reform of the parole system and the construction of more prisons. The most notable omission from his prcis of the government’s efforts to combat crime was any mention of guns.
He did not even broach the editorial’s proposition that the ANC make gun control an election issue, bearing in mind that the majority – and certainly the more passionate – of South Africa’s gun-owning population are unlikely to be supporters of the ruling party.
Why the avoidance of the fact that our status as a gun-crazy society is one of the biggest contributors to the criminality that Hofmeyr acknowledges as the most serious problem facing South Africa?
South Africa’s gun statistics are self- explanatory and terrifying. According to the lobby group Gun Free South Africa, there are about 30 gun-related deaths logged daily in South Africa. This makes guns the fastest-growing cause of death in South Africa, outstripping even the carnage that takes place on our roads. Many of these deaths, of course, have nothing to do with crime, but are instead recorded beneath demure headlines such as “Man shoots wife, self”.
According to police figures, an average of 220 000 people have applied for gun licences each year for the past five years, and few of these applications are rejected. There are convicted murderers among the successful applicants. Only the police can provide a check on who is granted a gun licence, and the police force is so over-stretched that it is difficult to expect it to ensure, for example, that applicants, who only have to be 16 years old, have a safe in which to store a weapon.
All of which is governed by the Arms and Ammunition Act, an extraordinary piece of legislation passed in 1969, which allows licenced firearm owners to lend their guns to someone else on a temporary basis. According to Sheena Duncan of Gun Free South Africa, police in some provinces have found that up to 80% of gun holders stopped at roadblocks were carrying letters from gun licensees who had loaned them their weapons. The Act also allows licences to be made out in the name of an organisation, which is then entitled to distribute the guns as it pleases. The ANC has 317 of such licences.
A good start would therefore have been to torpedo most of this Act in Parliament, but after five years the statute remains untouched. Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi has, however, tried. In 1997 he unsuccessfully sought to amend the section which allows licensees to loan their weapons by signing off a note. But the amendment was spiked by the parliamentary safety and security committee.
A new process to draft a replacement to the Act – which will hopefully switch the focus from rubber stamping licences to controlling guns – is underway, but has been subject to several delays so is unlikely to be dealt with this year. The government has meanwhile set up various committees to monitor and forge policy on guns. The committees have delivered their reports but nothing has been done with their findings.
When cornered, other Cabinet ministers have acknowledged the problem, but have shied away from talk of a ban. In 1997, when pushed by this newspaper for his opinion on gun control, Minister of Justice Dullah Omar said the abolition of guns remained a long term objective – part of government’s “quest to build a human rights society”.
Omar added there was no point in banning guns until the country developed a decent criminal justice system and that even if a ban were imposed “no one would obey it”. It was an extraordinary admission of defeat, which probably offers a true reflection of most of his colleagues’ approach to the matter.
A total ban naturally remains, for now, a Utopian ideal. It would require a mammoth co-ordinated effort between the police and army, and probably assistance from an external monitoring force, all of whom would have to ensure implementation of draconian penalties.
Most of the police would also have to be disarmed, considering many of them are in any case more likely to commit a crime than the average civilian. In short, a ban would boil down to a massive exercise in social engineering. But there is nevertheless no harm in the government stating, openly, loudly, and repeatedly that this is its ultimate goal. In the meantime it should fast track a new arms Act and find some way of dealing with the proliferation of illegal weapons.
Duncan says the government’s inactivity where guns are concerned is, quite simply, beyond comprehension. She says the only possible explanation is that there are “great differences of opinion” on the matter within the ruling party. It is therefore a matter that requires the muscle of the party president, Thabo Mbeki, to forge unity and make it a national issue of paramount importance.
In his letter last week, Hofmeyr acknowledged that some of the M&G’s suggestions were valid – presumably not those about the personalities involved in the fight against crime.
He went on to conclude: “The fight against crime is ill-served by ignoring the fact that action has already been taken and some progress made on almost every issue you raise. One expects a more serious treatment from a newspaper that markets itself as a serious read.”
To which the obvious reply is that if the government wants its assurances on law enforcement to be taken seriously by the millions of South Africans who live in terror, it will have to start adopting a more serious attitude towards guns.