MORE than 800 children are killed by gunfire in South Africa each year, an anti-gun activist told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday. “The equivalent of an entire school is wiped out by guns each year,” David Newby, Western Cape chairman of Gun Free South Africa, told the National Assembly’s portfolio committee on education, quoting police statistics. They showed that 819 youngsters under the age of 18 were killed by guns in 1998. Newby said that only 63,8% of schools in the highest crime areas of the country regarded themselves as gun free.