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Ninety-nine percent of firearm-related killings in South Africa are committed with unlicensed guns.

This is according to Acting Minister of Police Firoz Cachalia, who was replying to a question from a Freedom Front Plus member of parliament, Wouter Wessels.

Wessels asked the minister about murders and firearms and their origins, to which the minister replied: “A total of 120 persons were murdered by a legal firearm used by a licenced firearm owner during the 2022-23 financial year. Ninety [people] were murdered during the 2023-24 financial year, 108 during the 2024-25 financial year and 75 during the 2025-26 financial year.”

By comparison, the minister said, “A total of 10 613 persons were murdered using an unlicenced firearm during the 2022-23 financial year, 10 911 were murdered during the 2023-24 financial year, 10 450 during the 2024-25 financial year and 9 323 during the 2025-26 financial year.”

Do the maths on that and for every individual murdered by a legally owned firearm, ninety-nine others are victims of illegal ones.

Despite this, a new Bill is moving through the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) – a statutory body where government, business, trade unions, and community groups negotiate South Africa’s major economic and labour policies – that seeks to repeal section 13 of the Firearms Control Act (FCA). If passed, it would eliminate self-defence, the protection of others, and the protection of property as valid grounds for owning a firearm.

This proposal is a near-identical revival of a 2021 draft that was shelved following more than 200 000 public objections.

But the problem with this kind of thinking around gun control and legislation runs even deeper. When the FCA took full effect in July 2004, it made no impact on the country’s murder rate. The chart below shows that the murder rate was already falling steeply ahead of the Act and initially continued to fall thereafter, although at a slightly lesser rate before beginning to rise again.

More troubling is that the crimes most likely to be committed with firearms such as armed house and business robberies increased steeply after the implementation of the Act. It would be difficult to justify the argument that this was entirely because of the At, but it is entirely sufficient to say that in so far as the Act targeted legal firearms owners, it made no discernible impact on the types of crimes that terrify South Africans the most.

The chart below shows house and business robbery data since 2003.

Even the basic responsibility to administer the new Act in an efficient manner is something that has seemingly defeated the ability of the police, with data on firearm licence renewals being the latest evidence that the police are wholly unable to administer the law they already have, let alone new and more complex ones. Those most recent data suggest that firearm relicensing rates (and relicensing is a requirement of the new Act even if the circumstances of the individual involved have not changed) have fallen by over 50% in the past five years as the public just give up on the near-impossible administrative burdens involved.

To a very great extent, the obsession with further regulating civilian gun ownership is ideological and a device to fool the public into thinking that the government doing something about violent crime. On balance, the evidence suggests that a well-regulated citizenry with access to weapons for any lawful purpose, from hunting and sport shooting to self-defence, is a net benefit to South Africa and its economy.