INSIDE
South Africa’s crime nightmare
● South Africans are staring down the barrel of a gun, according to this week’s crime statistics, which showed that 42% of murders and 60% of aggravated robberies are committed with firearms.
The country is locked in what anti-gun activists call a “domestic arms race” as criminals and citizens alike equip themselves for life in what has been characterised this week as a war zone. And women are increasingly in the line of fire, with the number killed daily rising from three to eight in a single year.
Richard Matzopoulos, a deputy director at the South African Medical Research Council, said the “disproportionate increase in murders of women and children … is indicative of a society becoming more violent”.
Alan Marthezé, the manager of City Guns in Cape Town, said women were responding by arming themselves. As a mother and daughter shopped this week for a pistol for personal protection, he said he was seeing more women customers and “almost every one of them has been a victim of crime”.
Adèle Kirsten, director of Gun Free SA, said women were particularly at risk of gun violence in their own homes with a legal gun.
“When we think of gun murders, we think of gangs, taxis and predatory behaviour, but we don’t think of the domestic realm,” she said.
Kirsten and Matzopoulos said the biggest concern in the murder statistics remained the number of young men being killed.
“We pay young men too little attention. They are being shot to death at nine times the rate of their female counterparts,” said Matzopoulos. “Men are more frequently both the victims and the perpetrators of most violence and should be primary targets for interventions.”
Overall, said Kirsten, a simple equation emerged from the crime statistics: enforce gun control and homicides will go down.
Marthezé, however, said most guns used in violent crime were illegally obtained, while Gideon Joubert of Gun Owners SA said: “People are starting to feel more vulnerable. They also realise that police can’t defend people. I often tell people: you are the first respondent to a crime committed against you.”
Kirsten agreed that most crimes are committed with illegal guns, but said most of them were once legal. “Every day 25 legal guns are lost or stolen — most from civilians, not cops — and in the process become illegal. We can say with confidence that 99% of guns were once legal.”
Matzopoulos, who has carried out extensive research on gun deaths, said a phased approach to gun control was the answer. “A first step is to get really good control of the guns that are already in circulation. We were getting to that point and we were on the right path. Now we need to progress and to get guns out of private hands.”
In the late 1990s gun homicides hit a record high, with around 34 people being shot dead every day. In 2000, the Firearms Control Act came in, “along with a whole set of interventions, including massive intelligence operations, search and seizures, and a more co-ordinated response”, said Kirsten.
Crime statistics over the following few years showed a dramatic drop in gun-related deaths, but from 2011 they started to rise again as enforcement slackened and corruption took root, said Kirsten.
“If you reduce access and availability, you reduce gun-related deaths. If guns are causing 42% of homicides, who would not want to interrupt that and take it out of the equation? It is simply about removing a piece of hardware,” she said.