Barely two weeks ago, one of the world’s most powerful men, a dedicated hunter and self-proclaimed outdoorsman, mistook a 78-year-old friend for a bird and shot him in the face. And recently, the South African government took at least one step back from the full implementation of legislation intended to allow only the most capable people to own and use firearms.
The two events appear unrelated, but they raise an intriguing question: Would Dick Cheney’s friends be safer if he were South African?
The main innovation of the Firearms Control Act, passed in 2000 amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth among gun-owners, was the dual permit system.
The first permit is the competency certificate, issued on the strength of an assessment of the prospective gun-owner’s fitness to own a weapon — his/her knowledge of the firearm and its use, knowledge of the law, and being a ”fit and proper person”.
The second permit is the firearm licence itself, issued on the basis of a demonstrated need. Permissible needs are hunting, dealing, manufacture and, in the case of Joe Public, self-defence. To obtain a licence for the last of these, the applicant must show something potentially quite onerous: a need for self-defence that cannot reasonably be satisfied except by possessing a firearm.
As originally promulgated, both the competency certificate and the firearm licence were to be renewed every five years. Regulation, which eventually came out in 2004, envisaged a four-phase relicensing process ending in 2008, with the first phase requiring gun-owners born between January 1 and March 31 to relicense by end-March this year.
In concept, all this is quite sensible. The trouble is that issuing competency certificates and licences at the required rate has proved impossible because about 500 000 existing gun-owners must be recertified each year — to say nothing of new applicants.
It’s one thing to require gun-owners to demonstrate their knowledge of the law and their proficiency with a gun. But issuing the 2 000-odd certificates needed every day is a tough ask.
The same applies to the registrar of firearms, who was required to conduct 2 000 daily searches of applicants’ criminal records, and whatever other inquiries are needed to declare him/her ”fit and proper”, including whether the applicant is known to be violent or mentally unstable.
While much of the legwork for this can be done at police stations, bottlenecks have developed wherever the system is centralised. The appeals process, in particular, appears logjammed.
There has been some official muttering about resistance by gun-owners, but any non-compliance is probably the result of frustration and confusion.
Obtaining and renewing the firearm licence is just as tricky. Precisely how an applicant is to show that the need for self-defence can only be reasonably satisfied by possessing a firearm is unclear. In practice, no objective standards can be set for this. The result is that applicants often perceive decision-making to be frustratingly arbitrary.
Given these problems, the government has now sought to lighten its load by proposing that only the competency certificate be renewable, and that, in effect, licences will be issued for life. This will alleviate some of the pressure on the system, while also removing some uncertainty from gun-owners, who fear that existing licences will be revoked on re-application.
The second big change being proposed, and arguably the larger retreat from the original conception of the law, is that the restrictions introduced in 2000 on the number of firearm licences that can be issued to an individual will apply only to new applications. Gun-owners who had dozens of firearms licensed under the old Act will be entitled to keep them all.
The thinking behind this proposal is hard to understand. It may be that the government simply wanted to avoid what might have been an embarrassing (and expensive) setback if gun-owners took this provision to the Constitutional Court on the grounds that it infringed their property rights.
Precisely how these changes will affect the registrar’s ability to handle the volume of applications and renewals is unclear.
What is clear, however, is that Cheney’s friend would have been safer had the two men been South Africans and the law had been applied rigorously. Indeed, he may have struggled to get a competency certificate — any number of people would have been willing to swear before a commissioner of oaths that he is mentally unstable.
Anthony Altbeker is a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies. His first book, The Dirty Work of Democracy: A Year on the Streets with the SAPS, was published recently by Jonathan Ball Publishers