By Daanyaal Matthews
The City of Cape Town has been embroiled in crime since time immemorial, with the Mother City’s landscape riddled with illegal activity, with gang warfare being a great concern for the denizens of the Cape Flat. Gun Free South Africa, a South African non-governmental organisation, has called upon the government and legislation to introduce stricter controls for the betterment of South Africans by restricting the access that law-abiding citizens have to firearms.
Speaking on Ramadaan AM, Claire Taylor, researcher at Gun Free South Africa, has argued that law-abiding people are currently simply holding stock for criminals, stating:
“We know that 34 people are shot dead every day in South Africa and that guns are the leading cause of murder in this country. We also know that most of those murders and most other gun related crimes were committed with an illegal gun. But the biggest source of illegal guns in this country are licensed gun owners.
Taylor furthers this argument by stating that 23 guns are lost or stolen every day, and when queried about the response from the national government to these continuous calls for intervention, the activist stated:
“Government response has been focusing on operations like Operation Chanela, which is a stop, search, and seizure operation. There have been some recoveries of weapons through this. Actually, not that impressive; it’s about a 4% increase in the number of guns that have been recovered.”
According to the researcher at Gun Free South Africa, the problem with the initiative and its nature is that it does not address the source of guns, thus the need for tighter gun controls through legislation and state institutional involvement. For Taylor, recent government announcements, which have included building bulletproof play parks, are simply circumventing the problem by introducing changes that epitomise the dastardly state of gun control in the nation.
“This is an urgent call to the government to say: Is this where we’re getting to, that we have to have a bulletproof playground for our children to play safely? Because you’re not taking responsibility for ensuring that guns, illegal guns, are removed from our streets and the source of illegal guns is under control,” said the researcher at Guns Free South Africa.
However, while the country is united in its actions against illegal usage of guns and the need for more guns to be removed from the streets of Mother City, a large retort has been made against stricter gun control as it would limit the defensive capabilities of innocent citizens. For the researcher, however, this argument doesn’t compute, especially when utilising other nations as case studies.
“I would say to anybody who is considering buying a gun for self-defence, to really do your homework, to really look at the risk associated with having a gun for self-defence, and the research that we’ve got that is publicly available and that has been published globally shows that in South Africa, if you have a firearm on you, and you try and use it when you are under attack, you will get shot at if the criminals are armed,” stated Taylor.
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