and as gun laws tighten, crime rises and innocent law abiding citizens become unarmed victims…………. so goes gun control!

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Grappling with gun control; South Africa slaps tighter controls on firearm sales

PUBLICATION: Toronto Star
DATE: 2005.01.09
SECTION: BUSINESS
PAGE: D2
SOURCE: New York Times
BYLINE: Michael Wines
ILLUSTRATION: Joao Silva new york times Jan Jansen, owner of the Gun Cityshop in suburban Johannesburg, says his sales of firearms have dropped by about 80 per cent in recent months and he is currently busy refunding money to buyers whose applications for gun licences have been rejected.

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Grappling with gun control; South Africa slaps tighter controls on firearm sales
Stricter licensing requirements draw mixed reviews

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GEORGE, South Africa- Rossouw Botha, beefy and billiard-ball bald, leafs through his list of customers at Redneck Tactical Supplies, dismay in his eyes and contempt in his voice, even though he is mostly repeating two words, over and over.

“Turned down,” he spits out, and leafs another page or two. “Turned down.”

Four more pages, and once again, “Turned down.”

Many of Botha’s clients have been turned down. The rest are waiting to be approved, but many of them could be turned down, too.

South Africa has a new gun-ownership law, and since it took effect last summer, Redneck Tactical Supplies, one of two firearms shops in this rather proper beach town, has applied to the government for ownership certificates for about 250 prospective buyers.

“So far, we have yet to receive one certificate,” Botha says.

The new gun law has weapons dealers and users upset. Firearms sales, once 15,000 a month, have fallen to near zero, because of the law’s imposing regulatory hurdles and the glacial government bureaucracy that oversees them.

“Not a single licence has been issued for a firearm that the association is aware of,” says Andrew Soutar, chairman of the South African Arms and Ammunition Dealers Association.

“Dealers who were selling 400 firearms a month have now dropped to two or three. A lot of people see it as nothing more than a deliberate disarmament process, and at great expense to the nation.” On the other hand, advocates of gun control are delighted.

“Obviously, we’re making an impact,” says Judy Bassingthwaite, national director of the leading lobby for curbs on gun ownership. “That’s very good news.”

Bassingthwaite says her Gun Free South Africa organization did not seek to put gun shops out of business and attributes some of the substantial decline in weapon sales to what she calls teething problems in the police agency that is carrying out the new law.

In fact, the agency has a large backlog of applications and has wrestled with shortages of items as basic as printed explanations of the law.

The South African Police Service, which oversees implementation of the law, agreed to take questions from a reporter by email but did not reply to them.

Bassingthwaite acknowledges that, “for those who are in love with their weapons, this is a huge challenge.”

Jan Jansen, owner of a suburban Johannesburg shop called Gun City, says he has 3,000 weapons in his vault – 80 per cent of which have been bought by people who are awaiting licences. Jansen says his gun sales have dropped by about 80 per cent in recent months and he is currently busy refunding money to buyers whose applications for licences have been rejected.

“If we don’t sell weapons, we don’t make money,” he says.

With the law in effect just a few months, it is too soon to determine its impact on violent crime, which swept the country in the 1990s.

By some mid-1990s estimates, one of every two white households owned at least one firearm, and ownership among non-whites has rapidly risen in the past decade.

Blacks were forbidden to own guns under apartheid.

The national police agency reports that 4.5 million firearms are legally registered and that there are at least 500,000 illegal guns in the country.

Within five years, officials say, all guns are to be registered, so that sales of new and used guns are controlled.

Unlike pro-gun groups in the United States, however, those in South Africa were powerless to stop lawmakers from enacting stiff firearms restrictions, partly because guns are not mentioned in the nation’s Constitution, and largely because of the public anger over violent criminals.

The law limits most citizens to one weapon for self-defence and a maximum of four others for other such uses as hunting or skeet shooting.

But critics say that acquiring a legal gun for any purpose is the big task.

Guns are to be automatically denied to drug or alcohol abusers, spouse abusers, people inclined to violence or “deviant behaviour” and anyone who has been imprisoned for violent or sex-related crimes.

The police interview three acquaintances of each applicant before deciding whether he or she is competent to own a gun.

Prospective owners must also pass a firearms course and install a safe or strongbox that meets police standards for gun storage.

More important, an applicant also must prove to the police that he or she needs a gun – a requirement, called motivation, that gun advocates complain is vague and hard to satisfy.

Vague, maybe; hard, undoubtedly.

In Thembalethu, a poor, sprawling black settlement on the southern coast about 10 kilometres southeast of George, Vuyani Dingiswayo, 25, says he applied six months ago for permission to own a gun.

The reason: he manages his family’s tavern, a local landmark that sells a great deal of beer, and must carry thousands of dollars in receipts to a bank in George each week.

After armed robbers raided a nearby business, Dingiswayo concluded that he needed some way to protect himself in the tavern, where he has taken to sleeping overnight to ward off burglars, and on trips to the bank.

“Last week, we had a function at the stadium,” he says. “We sold 200,000 rands worth of beer” – about $35,000 (U.S.) at current exchange rates.

“I’m afraid to drive alone with that kind of money. The guys who are there, drinking, sometimes I’m afraid of them. We’ve had a lot of robberies. It’s dangerous.”

In October, Dingiswayo’s application was rejected.

“Insufficient something,” he says. “They said I don’t have a good reason.”

That is a bit disingenuous, counters Noel Stott, a small-arms specialist at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria.

“The police aren’t saying what a good motivation is, because that would come to be like a template. The gun shops would just assist people, and it would become a pro forma type of thing. So they’re being very subjective.”

Soutar, of the Arms and Ammunition Dealers Association, calls that obstructionism.

Botha, of Redneck Tactical Supplies, goes a step further and accuses the government of hurting the very people it liberated from apartheid in 1994.

“Ninety-nine-point-five per cent of my firearms customers are black,” he says. “They live in traditional areas where crime is out of control. How come we’re denying them the right to protect themselves?”

“I sell 200, 300 cans of pepper spray a week,” he says, adding caustically: “Maybe people are scared.”

The chair of the year-old Black Gun Owners Association, Abios Khoele, contends the law is so strict that it is having the opposite of its intended effect.

“Most of the people, they’ve already started to buy illegal firearms,” he says.

“Most of them are for self-defence, because they’re living in some areas where the police are unable to protect them.”

Khoele says he has already signed up 5,000 members and represents far more.

But Bassingthwaite counters that her Gun Free South Africa organization represents “the unarmed majority” of South Africa’s 45 million people.

“Thirty people die of gun-related injuries every day,” she says. “That’s over 10,000 annually, and between 1,000 and 1,200 are under 17. It’s like a whole high school.”

Gun owners should not forget that their plight could be worse, says Stott, the small-arms specialist.

In neighbouring Botswana, the government agrees to process a bare 400 applications for gun ownership each year, and applicants are chosen by lottery.

By that standard, he says, “this is still quite a liberal law.” ‘For those who are in love with their weapons, this is a huge challenge’