Deadly gun stats can’t be ignored
· Citizen
To liberals, gun control has always seemed eminently sensible. There is logic in the argument that the fewer guns we have, the less gun violence will occur and the fewer people will end up in coffins, thanks to bullets.
South Africa, despite its frontier-type history, tends to lean more towards the British and European attitude of firearms in private hands than it does to the American one.
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In the Land of the Free, the Second Amendment to the US constitution guarantees the right of citizens to “bear arms”. The country has changed dramatically since the days of rebellion against the British Crown, when the constitution’s founding fathers first refined their ideas of freedom.
Today, that right to bear arms means access to deadly weapons like military-grade assault rifles is easy – and reports of mass killings, especially at schools, are the highest in the world. South Africa, as a former British colony, seems to take the view that fewer weapons in private hands is preferable… and that these should be licensed, whether for sport or self-defence use.
In recent years, however, successive ANC governments have been accused of wanting to disarm private gun owners through making licensing more difficult.
The gun lobby has argued that, in our age of rampant and violent crime, guns can save lives… and that much of the violence wrought by firearms is by the unlicensed ones. Now, official figures have confirmed that view… dramatically.
You are 100 times more likely to be shot and killed by an illegal firearm than by a gun which is properly licensed, official statistics show.
In the past four years, more than 41 000 people were killed by illegal guns, while just 393 died from licensed guns in the same period. Those numbers say more than any gun lobbyist could. That cannot be ignored or explained away