There is a particular irony in a government that claims to be concerned about gun violence proposing legislation that punishes its most responsible gun owners. Yet that is precisely what South Africa's draft amendment to the Firearms Control Act (FCA) threatens to do — and it does so in direct defiance of research the state itself commissioned.

The proposed changes — including arbitrary caps on the number of firearms and ammunition a sport shooter may own, and an outright ban on the private reloading of ammunition — would effectively destroy competitive and recreational shooting sports in this country. That is not hyperbole. It is the foreseeable, logical consequence of restrictions that show no understanding of how shooting sports actually work, and no regard for the evidence base the government paid to produce.

Why Shooting Sports Matter

Firearms proficiency is a perishable skill. Unlike riding a bicycle or swimming, shooting ability degrades meaningfully without consistent, structured practice. Shooting sports provide exactly that structure: a competitive, peer-accountable environment in which skills are regularly tested against published benchmarks and fellow participants.

The result is a community of gun owners who are not merely licensed, but genuinely competent — people who handle their firearms with discipline, accuracy, and deep familiarity with safe practice. This is not a trivial distinction. It is the difference between a licensed driver who passed their test ten years ago and rarely drives, and one who navigates traffic daily and attends advanced driving courses.

Sport shooters come from all walks of life. Among them are police officers, private security professionals, and military veterans — people for whom high-level firearms proficiency is not a hobby but a professional necessity. Competitive shooting is one of the few civilian environments that drives these skills to an elite level. When shooting sports weaken, so does the broader ecosystem of skilled, safety-conscious gun ownership that benefits everyone.

What the State is Actually Proposing

The government has been refreshingly candid about its objectives. The draft amendment states that its purpose is to minimise public access to firearms in order to “preserve public order”. Taken at face value, this framing treats licensed firearm owners — people who have passed background checks, completed safety training, and complied with the law — as a threat to be managed rather than a constituency to be served.

The specific provisions targeting sport shooters are particularly difficult to justify. Take the numerical limits on firearm ownership. What the state appears to have overlooked — or chosen to ignore — is that Section 16 licence applicants must already convince the Registrar of the Central Firearms Register (CFR) that they have a legitimate need for each and every firearm they apply for. Fail to demonstrate that need, and the application is declined. In practice, the numerical limit is already zero unless you can prove a case. Imposing an arbitrary ceiling on top of this existing gatekeeping mechanism is not a public safety measure — it is bureaucratic redundancy dressed up as policy.

The ban on private ammunition reloading is equally indefensible. Reloading is a meticulous, technically demanding practice requiring primers and propellant powder — two components that are themselves classified and controlled as strictly as ammunition under South African law. Any criminal attempting to reload their own ammunition faces exactly the same legal barriers as they do when acquiring commercially manufactured rounds. The notion that banning reloading closes a criminal loophole is not supported by any evidence. If illicit reloading is occurring, it is because of the same underlying failures that allow illegal firearms and ammunition to circulate at all: corruption within the SAPS and the CFR, the decades-long failure to digitise the CFR as legally required since July 2004, and the collapse of Crime Intelligence. Punishing compliant, law-abiding gun owners for institutional failures they did not cause and cannot remedy is not a policy — it is scapegoating.

The Government's Own Research Contradicts This Bill

Perhaps the most damning aspect of the proposed amendments is that they contradict the findings of a report the government itself commissioned. The Civilian Secretariat for Police contracted the Wits School of Governance to conduct a rigorous, 15-year analysis of the effect of the FCA on crime — precisely the kind of evidence base that should inform legislative reform.

The report’s conclusions are unambiguous. It found that strong policing, not the FCA, is the necessary condition for reducing firearm-related crime. In periods of intensive policing — such as the operations surrounding the 2010 FIFA World Cup — crime fell and firearm usage in crimes declined. When strong policing was withdrawn, crime rose again, regardless of the FCA remaining in force. The Act, the researchers concluded, is not sufficient to reduce firearm-related crime in the absence of effective policing.

The report’s first and most prominent recommendation was stark: authorities should stop placing misplaced, unconditional faith in the FCA as a solution to crime and concentrate instead on policing. It explicitly warned against the pattern of proposing ever-stronger amendments to the Act as a response to rising crime — describing this as rationalising dissonance rather than addressing the actual problem.

The draft amendments do exactly what the state’s own researchers warned against. They double down on legislative restriction while the real drivers of gun crime — illegal firearms, institutional corruption, under-policing, and a non-functional CFR database — remain unaddressed.

The Theft Argument: What the Data Actually Show

The most common justification for restricting civilian firearm ownership is that legally owned guns end up in criminal hands through theft. It sounds plausible. But a decade of data drawn from SAPS Annual Reports tell a more complicated and rather inconvenient story for the proponents of this bill.

Between 2013/14 and 2022/23, civilians reported an average of approximately 7 500 firearms lost or stolen per year — a figure that is likely accurate, given that failure to report a loss within 24 hours carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison. Over the same ten-year period, however, the SAPS recovered 6 736 more firearms than were reported lost or stolen from civilian sources. The net contribution of civilian losses to criminal firearm stocks was, in aggregate, negative. The criminal pool was shrinking, not growing.

Even setting recoveries aside entirely, those 7 500 annual civilian losses represent just 0.3% of the estimated 2.35 million illicit firearms already in circulation in South Africa according to the Global Small Arms Survey. The premise that restricting civilian ownership will meaningfully reduce criminal access to firearms is not supported by the numbers.

What the data do reveal as a genuine problem is state custodianship of firearms. Over the same decade, the SAPS recovered only 38% of its own reported lost or stolen firearms — leaving more than 5000 police firearms unaccounted for. And that is before accounting for the broader universe of approximately 502 state entities that collectively own some 2.2 million firearms, most of which operate with record-keeping so poor that, as one researcher noted after filing PAIA applications to every government institution, they either do not take the issue seriously or are simply unable to say how many firearms they are losing. State entities are estimated to lose approximately 1800 firearms per year, with the majority of losses going unreported.

The most infamous illustration of the real source of the problem is the case of SAPS Colonel Chris Prinsloo, who sold thousands of firearms from state custody to criminal gangs. Prinsloo has been described by investigators as having identified the state as the easiest way to source weapons in bulk — not suburban burglaries, not licensed sport shooters. The systemic vulnerabilities he exploited remain unresolved.

The picture that emerges from the data is the inverse of what the draft bill assumes. Civilian gun owners are not a meaningful pipeline into criminal stocks. The state is. The appropriate legislative response to that finding is rigorous accountability for state firearms custodianship, not arbitrary restrictions on licensed civilians.

A Culture Worth Protecting

South Africa's shooting sports community represents something genuinely valuable: a self-regulating culture of responsibility, skill, and peer accountability. It produces safer gun owners, maintains a pipeline of qualified armed professionals, and offers citizens who choose to own firearms for self-defence the opportunity to become genuinely proficient rather than merely licensed.

A government serious about public safety would be looking for ways to expand and support that culture — not to legislate it out of existence, and certainly not in direct contradiction of its own research and the data its own police service has been collecting for a decade.

If you believe citizens have the right to defend themselves, and that responsible gun ownership should be encouraged rather than penalised, there are two concrete steps you can take: join a gun owners’ organisation, and write to your political representatives urging them to oppose this bill. The window to act is open — but not indefinitely.

The author writes on firearms policy and civil liberties in South Africa. Firearm loss and recovery data cited in this article is drawn from SAPS Annual Reports for the financial years 2013/14 to 2022/23. The Wits School of Governance report referenced is: “Analysis of the Effect of the Firearms Control Act on Crime, 2000–2014,” commissioned by the Civilian Secretariat for Police Service.