This is my reloading press.

They come in many shapes and sizes, and some are small enough to fit in your pocket. But they all do exactly the same thing: assemble four components into an ammunition cartridge.

What are these four components? A bullet, a cartridge casing, propellant powder, and a primer.

The proposed amendments to the Firearms Control Act (FCA) seek to outlaw this practice. Owning and operating a reloading press to manufacture ammunition for personal use in your own home would be against the law. The authors of this piece of draft legislation do not seem to know much about reloading at all. Or, if they do, they are counting on you not knowing. Such asymmetry of information would make it easier to persuade members of the public to support an arbitrary, invasive, and very harmful restriction on firearm ownership.

Returning to the four components of ammunition – two are completely unregulated: the cartridge casing and the bullet. The casing is a hollow piece of brass, and the bullet is a lump of lead (either bare or covered with powder coating or copper plating). Both are entirely inert. Our practice of not regulating the sale or possession of bullets and cartridge casings is fully aligned with the laws of the vast majority of European Union member states, where these components are legally considered to be inert pieces of metal.

The other two components – primers and propellant powder – are strictly regulated under two separate acts: the Firearms Control Act 60 of 2000 (where primers are defined as “ammunition”) and the Explosives Act 26 of 1956 (where propellant powder is defined as “explosives”). Both Acts put strict legal limits on the sale and possession of primers and propellant powder, including the number of primers and amount of propellant an individual may purchase and possess at any given time.

In short, to purchase primers you require a valid firearm licence in a calibre appropriate for the type of primer – the transaction is treated exactly the same as if you were buying actual ammunition. All the purchaser’s details – their full name, ID number, physical address, calibre on licence card, licence number, and licence date – are recorded in the dealer’s ammunition register, identical to when someone purchases ammunition. You cannot purchase primers if you cannot legally purchase ammunition – there is no loophole here.

Similar Process

Purchasing propellant powder follows a similar process. You can only obtain propellant from firearm dealerships that have obtained the required dealer licence – a separate licence from their firearm and ammunition dealer licence under the FCA. The purchaser must again present a valid firearm licence, and their relevant details are recorded in a separate register specifically for the dispensing of propellant powder. Again, you cannot obtain propellant powder if you cannot legally purchase ammunition.

Both these transactions must occur in person. The purchasing party physically signs the paper register with an ink pen in both cases. One could say that this process is perhaps archaic and in urgent need of an update, but it certainly puts paid to the misinformed claim that private ammunition reloading creates some sort of loophole.

A fair objection is that registers record what is bought, not what is built. That is true, but it matters less than it sounds. Every cartridge needs exactly one primer, and primers can only be bought against a licence, with the purchase recorded by name. The primer register is therefore, in effect, a ceiling on how many rounds any individual can assemble. Reloaded ammunition is also no more exposed to diversion than factory ammunition: a licence holder who sells or hands rounds to an unlicensed person commits the same offence either way. If the concern is that the paper registers are slow, easy to lose, and impossible to audit, then the answer is to digitise and tighten them, a reform shooters have asked for themselves. Banning a practice that is already tied to a licence, a signature, and a quantity limit does nothing to close a gap that the registers could close better.

But what is the purpose of reloading ammunition? If it is as regulated as purchasing factory ammunition, why bother going to all the effort of obtaining the required components and equipment, and spending a not-insignificant amount of time to assemble them? Surely it is just easier to buy a box of ammo?

Legitimate Reasons

There are numerous legitimate reasons why people choose to reload their own ammunition. I will touch on a few of those here.

Cost is an incredibly significant motivator. Depending on the individual calibre, amortised equipment costs, and reloading recipe applied, you can reload for about half to a third of the cost of factory ammunition, and in some calibres as little as a quarter. The implication of this is that you can consume around three times as much ammunition when you reload your own as when you are compelled to pay full retail price for factory ammunition.

I previously wrote about the importance of sport shooting in creating safe, proficient, and responsible gun owners. Reloading plays a vital role in that.

Shooting is a perishable skill. It is a precision skill built on six fundamentals that must work together in a fraction of a second: grip, stance, sight picture, sight alignment, trigger control, and breathing. Those fundamentals are only anchored in our neural pathways through repetition, and they fade without it. The standards we set for those who carry firearms professionally reflect that.

Agencies abroad, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the United States Federal Air Marshal Service, set demanding and regular qualification standards for this reason. Locally, private security officers must pass a refresher and qualification shoot every year. South African Police Service officers, by contrast, are assessed only once every five years, reportedly because of budget and ammunition constraints. Officers who take their safety seriously, security guards who want to be more than minimally competent, and private citizens who carry for self-defence all end up funding their own extra practice. So do the sport shooters who fill our competitive disciplines, who fire hundreds of rounds per match before counting practice at all.

Dry-fire practice, working the trigger and sights without live ammunition, has its uses, but it only goes so far. Under stress, people do not rise to the occasion; they fall back on whatever they have practised most. Nothing replaces regular, structured live fire, and live fire costs money. A shooter forced onto factory ammunition gets roughly a third of the practice from the same budget. If we want armed citizens to be accurate, safe, and proficient, any law that makes training more expensive works against that goal. Banning reloading does exactly that.

Hunting

Another reason for reloading pertains to ethical hunting. Hunters benefit from both the cost advantages of reloading and improvements in the quality and accuracy of their ammunition. Lower ammunition costs mean hunters can practise with their rifles more often, contributing directly to the development of higher-quality marksmanship and riflecraft.

Most modern rifles are mass-produced in factories using high-quality tooling and standardised production practices and parts. Despite this, every individual rifle has minute differences in barrel profile, rifling, chambering, action, and trigger and firing mechanism. These minute differences, imperceptible to the layperson, mean that no two rifles of the same make and model have identical accuracy attributes, even when using factory ammunition from the same box.

Tailored reloads developed specifically for their individual rifles allow hunters to use ammunition that is superior in accuracy, consistency, and reliability to factory ammunition. This leads to consistent and accurate shot placement. In hunting, that is the difference between a clean, humane kill and a wounded animal. A ban on reloading is therefore a blow not only to the hunting economy, but to ethical hunting itself.

The importance of the above extends beyond hunting activities and can equally be applied to essentially all forms of game management, nature conservation, and agriculture. A reloading ban’s consequences reach far beyond the shooting range.

Lastly, reloading is a legitimate activity in and of itself. Numerous shooters spend more time reloading their own ammunition than they do shooting it. They spend small personal fortunes on acquiring and accessorising their reloading equipment. They consume large volumes of literature and other media regarding the countless nuances of reloading different calibres, and the varying attributes of all the different components. It is very much a legitimate and productive hobby. And it plays a vital role in protecting not only our heritage, but a piece of history itself.

Many historical calibres would simply have died out if it were not for the efforts of groups of enthusiasts, usually members of firearm collectors’ associations and historical societies, who have dedicated themselves to ensuring the continued existence of these forgotten calibres no longer produced by commercial factories.

So let us return to my reloading press. It sits on a utility trolley in my house, putting together four parts: two of them inert lumps of metal, and two that I could only buy with a valid firearm licence, signing my name, ID number, and licence details in a dealer’s register. That is not a loophole. It is one of the most tightly controlled activities a law-abiding gun owner can take part in. Banning it will not make society safer.What it will do is make shooters less proficient, hunters less ethical and historical firearms impossible to shoot, and turn thousands of responsible South Africans into criminals overnight.

Homework

Before this amendment goes any further, it is worth remembering that the state has already done its homework. The Wits School of Governance report, commissioned by the government in 2015 and kept from the public until 2021, found that strong policing, not ever-tighter firearm laws, is what reduces crime, and that the FCA by itself has a negligible impact on violent crime. This Bill ignores those findings entirely. It answers them with arbitrary caps, unworkable restrictions, and a reloading ban that traces nothing and protects no one. The FCA supposedly exists to promote public safety and the safe and responsible ownership of firearms. A Bill that contradicts the state’s own research and leaves law-abiding owners less proficient while doing nothing about criminals cannot be repaired by amendment. It should be withdrawn.

Gideon Joubert is an independent security consultant focused on enterprise risk management, a certified fraud examiner (CFE) and a member of ASIS International. He is a trustee of the South African Gunowners’ Association (SAGA), as well as an active competitive sport shooter and handloader.