Donald McNeil
A Second Look
Ah, the battle over gun control is finally coming to South Africa. What fun. You’re in for many years of bald lies, cooked statistics, pictures of dead children, thinly veiled racism, tall tales about small American towns that solved their crime problem by issuing everyone a machine gun and all the other dum-dums that enliven the endless gun debate on American shores.
The combination of the United States’s constitutional “right to bear arms” and a powerful gun lobby has completely crippled any effort to write sensible gun laws in the US. Lee Harvey Oswald bought the rifle he killed John F Kennedy with by mail order. The teenagers who killed 12 classmates at Columbine High School had a friend buy theirs at an outdoor “gun fair”. The rightwinger who wandered the Midwest shooting blacks, Jews and Asians bought his pistol from someone who bought a gun a week legally from a licensed dealer – for private resale.
Congress can’t even pass a law saying Americans may not own assault rifles, which are useful only to killers, not hunters.
The American gun lobby, which pretends to be a bunch of chummy duck-hunters, is supported by legions of people with vile motives – the importers of cheap pistols who want to sell to teenagers, the makers of kits that convert semi-automatic rifles to full auto machine guns, the nuts who’d like to hunt black people, “survivalists” and “militiamen” who want to shoot tax collectors, rightwingers who believe the United Nations has a secret army poised to invade the US in silent black helicopters.
However, they always push to the fore the kindly immigrant shop-owner who killed a robber with his licensed pistol and the dignified old gent with the Purdy shotgun worth $20 000. Gunshops pay heavy dues to the lobby. It’s well funded and well organised, and most congressmen are just plain afraid of it.
The catch is that the “right to bear arms” enshrined in the US Constitution is on their side. The American right to bear guns doesn’t stem from a right to defend one’s home against criminals (or against Indians, if you want to harp on our genocidal past). Nor from a right to hunt deer. It stems from a right to overthrow the government.
You don’t have that in your Constitution. In fact, your Constitution provides for states of emergency that make it easier for your government to overthrow you. We have an 18th- century Constitution, you have a 20th-century one.
So forget about any inherent right to own guns. In South Africa, there isn’t any.
You also don’t have our legal limitations. Your gun lobby is still only about as powerful as your anti-gun lobby. You’re used to common-sense ideas like a police check before issuing a gun licence. You still have time to write gun laws that make sense.
Some obviously need to change. You have a few that even Americans find crazy. The one that allows a licensed owner to legally “lend” his gun with a letter is an invitation to criminals. Also, your laws make it easier to buy a pistol than a rifle or shotgun (and encourages you to carry it concealed). I asked a gunshop-owner why, and he said it was because a pistol was to defend a home while a rifle or shotgun was for poaching. That logic makes sense in a rural society dominated by Afrikaner farmers. It doesn’t make sense in an urbanised society plagued by criminals.
In South Africa and the US, two trends are the same:
l Lots of legal guns lead to lots of illegal guns. Many are stolen. And many “good gun-owners” who want lax laws actually sell guns on the side.
l More guns, legal or illegal, lead to more killings. It takes far more effort to beat someone to death than to pull a trigger – ask Eugene de Kock.
It’s true, as the gun lobby says, that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. But easy gun laws mean many hot- headed young men get to shoot victims they would otherwise punch. Seize guns, and you trim fatalities.
You also cut down dramatically on the number of drunk husbands who kill their wives instead of beating them. The number of women like Charlize Theron’s mom who kill abusive husbands is tiny compared to the number of men who shoot their wives. All women should favour gun control: statistically, the domestic threat is far greater than the hijacker threat.
You could write laws like Israel or Switzerland – you serve in the army, you take your rifle home, you keep it safe. You’re on call to defend your country, and criminals know every law-abiding citizen has an assault rifle.
Only letting veterans own guns makes some sense. The army teaches respect for guns, and a drill sergeant who lives with you for eight weeks is a far better judge of your sanity than a silly “psychometric exam”.
Given the history of Collin Chauke’s pals, it might be best that only veterans of the former South African Defence Force qualify. That will lead to cries of racism, but that will rectify itself in a few years, since the South African National Defence Force is mostly black and getting blacker.
Alternatively, you might pass a law saying you can only legally own one gun. Or only buy one a year. That cuts down on “private” gun dealers.
Much more sensibly, you might ban all pistols. Make only guns with long barrels legal. (Even an AK-47 has a relatively short one.) It’s perfectly easy – even preferable – to defend your home with a shotgun. Hunters use rifles or shotguns. Cops and security guards can carry shotguns. So many off-duty cops are killed for their pistols that they’d be safer without.
Then set up metal detectors in malls, at traffic roadblocks, at taxi stands, at schools, at railroad stations. If short guns are simply illegal, you can be very aggressive about seizing them. No arguing about licences – you have one on you, it’s confiscated, you’re arrested.
Law-abiding white men who’ve had pistols in their belts or glove-boxes for decades will howl. So will black taxi drivers and security guards who’ve just won the right to own them. So will domestic pistol-makers like Vector.
Too bad. Let them howl.
Society is safer without concealed guns than with laws to keep them in “good” hands that inevitably fail. If they really need a gun, they can keep shotguns in the car.
Collectors will wail that they’ll lose expensive guns. Let them keep them – but not at home. Let them turn them over to museums. Display them with owner’s plaques. But for home defence, they must buy a cheap shotgun, not pretend they need an historic Luger.
Alternatively, you could outlaw all guns without advanced safety devices. There have been rapid advances in these, notably a gun with a microchip that lets it fire only if it gets a signal from the shooter’s bracelet. You hide the bracelet apart from the gun, and arm it by punching in a code, like an auto immobiliser.
In any case, come up with new ideas. The US’s are a huge flop.