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In South Africa, Licensing Law Poses Hurdles for Gun Buyers
Joao Silva for The New York Times
Johan Jansen talks with a customer examining a scope in Gun City, a store in suburban Johannesburg.
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: January 3, 2005
Joao Silva for The New York Times
Gun City has several thousand weapons, marked as sold, which cannot be given to their buyers because licenses have not yet been issued.
EORGE, 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."
Joao Silva for The New York Times
Johan Jansen talks with a customer examining a scope in Gun City, a store in suburban Johannesburg.
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: January 3, 2005
Joao Silva for The New York Times
Gun City has several thousand weapons, marked as sold, which cannot be given to their buyers because licenses have not yet been issued.
EORGE, 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."
