Stolen police weapons a bigger issue than privately owned guns 

Police minister Bheki Cele’s hats may be worn to keep the harsh African sun away from him, but when it comes to the issue of private ownership of firearms, we wonder if the headgear is not interfering with his logic.

That’s because he supports proposed amendments to a gun law to remove “self defence” as a reason for owning a gun… on the basis that if private citizens do not possess weapons, then the country’s crime rate will go down – because these guns won’t be stolen in break-ins by criminals.

While we are not denying that, in many cases, firearms are a primary target in burglaries and robberies, we would like to ask the minister: where do the semi-automatic assault rifles, like AK47s, R4s and R5s, used in cash-in-transit robberies, come from, then?

The answer, conveniently ignored by the minister, is that these weapons are stolen from police and military armouries or are part of arms caches lain down decades ago by his own ANC, or they’re being brought in illegally across our borders.

And all of those things, we should suggest, are far more worrying than guns in private hands.

It is also true, as the anti-gun lobby argues, that many privately owned guns are not used in self-defence of their owners, but in crimes of passion to murder family members or people close to the gun owner.

However, there are occasions when a firearm has proved to be the difference between life and death for an innocent victim.

And, as women gun training group Girls on Fire points out, a gun may be the way a woman doesn’t become yet another grim statistic in the gender-based violence files.

Better policing and prosecution of criminals – and heavy sentences for illegal possession of firearms – are better than unilaterally disarming a large chunk of a vulnerable population.