In South Africa, Licensing Law Poses Hurdles for Gun Buyers

January 3, 2005
By MICHAEL WINES (New York Times)

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

"Turned down," he spat out, and leafed another page or two.
"Turned down." Four more pages, and once again, "Turned
down."

Many of Mr. 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
white-picket-fence type of beach town, has applied to the
government for ownership certificates for about 250
prospective buyers.

"So far, we have yet to receive one certificate," Mr. Botha
said.

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 license has been issued for a firearm that
the association is aware of," said Andrew Soutar, the
chairman of the South African Arms and Ammunition Dealers
Association.

"Dealers who were selling 400 firearms a month have now
dropped to 2 or 3," he said. "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," said Judy
Bassingthwaite, the national director of the leading lobby
for curbs on gun ownership, Gun Free South Africa. "That's
very good news."

Ms. Bassingthwaite said her organization did not seek to
put gun shops out of business, and attributed some of the
substantial decline in weapons sales to what she called
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, the national police
agency, which oversees implementation of the law, agreed to
take questions from a reporter only by e-mail, but did not
reply to them.

Still, Ms. Bassingthwaite acknowledged, "for those who are
in love with their weapons, this is a huge challenge."

The situation is little different in Johannesburg, where
Jan Jansen, the owner of a suburban shop called Gun City,
said he had 3,000 weapons in his vault - 80 percent of
which had been bought by people who were awaiting licenses.
Mr. Jansen said that his gun sales had dropped by about 80
percent in recent months, and that he was busy these days
refunding money to buyers whose applications for licenses
had been rejected.

"If we don't sell weapons, we don't make money," he said


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 1990's. But gun control is a topic of much
passion, as it is in the United States.

By some mid-1990's estimates, one of every two white
households owned at least one firearm, and ownership among
nonwhites has rapidly risen in the past decade. Blacks were
forbidden to own guns under apartheid.

The police agency reports that 4.5 million firearms are
legally registered; illegal firearms are estimated to
number at least 500,000. Within five years, officials said,
all those 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 Parliament 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, approved in 2000 but taking effect only last year,
limits most citizens to one weapon for self-defense and a
maximum of four others for other uses, like hunting or
skeet shooting.

But getting any gun at all, critics say, is the big task.
Guns are to be automatically denied to drug or alcohol
abusers, spouse abusers, people inclined to violence or
"deviant behavior" 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 gun owners must pass a firearms course.
They also must 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, which gun advocates complain is vague and hard
to satisfy.

Vague, maybe; hard, undoubtedly. In Thembalethu, a
sprawling, poor black settlement on the southern coast
about seven miles 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.

Mr. Dingiswayo said he had slept in the tavern each night
to ward off burglars. After armed robbers raided a nearby
business, he said, he concluded that he needed some way to
protect himself in the tavern and on trips to the bank.

"Last week we had a function at the stadium," he said. "We
sold 200,000 rands worth of beer" - about $35,000, 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 robbery.
It's dangerous."

In October, Mr. Dingiswayo's application was rejected.
"Insufficient something," he said. "They said I don't have
a good reason."

That is a bit disingenuous, said 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," he
said. "The gun shops would just assist people, and it would
become a pro forma type of thing. So they're being very
subjective."

Mr. Soutar, of the Arms and Ammunition Dealers Association,
calls that obstructionism. Mr. 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 percent of my firearms customers
are black," he said. "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 said. "In
George." He added caustically, "Maybe people are scared."

The chairman of the year-old Black Gun Owners Association,
Abios Khoele, contends that 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 said. "Most of them are for self-defense, because
they're living in some areas where the police are unable to
protect them."

Mr. Khoele says he has already signed up 5,000 members and
represents far more. But it is Ms. Bassingthwaite, of Gun
Free South Africa, who says she represents "the unarmed
majority" among South Africa's 45 million people. "Thirty
people die of gun-related injuries every day," she said.
"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, said Mr. Stott, the
small-arms specialist, that their plight could be worse. In
neighboring Botswana, the government agrees to process a
bare 400 applications for gun ownership each year, and the
applicants are chosen by lottery.

By that standard, he said, "this is still quite a liberal
law."

Hmmm, sounds like a typically Orwellian bureaucracy.

George

That sucks ! ! !

Dam stupid worthless liberals laws. More crime will result , Black market gun sales etc . etc.

partly because guns are not mentioned in the nation's Constitution....

Lest we forget.....