If Zweli Mnisi is any example of current police strategy and thinking, South Africa is surely in deep trouble. The news release of Nov. 11, 2009 says it all.

Mnisi said; "The reduction of the number of firearms in circulation is an important part of the South African Police Service's strategy to combat violent crime." If the police assume that chasing guns instead of criminals is an effective crime-fighting tool then they are sadly mistaken, misinformed and performing a (grave) public disservice.

The police have offered no proof of any causal relationship between guns and crime, so quoting reams of irrelevant statistics to scare the public is highly irresponsible. Not only are the police wasting vast amounts of manpower and resources, they also spend an undisclosed but undoubtedly sizable portion of their budget on this futile waste. No reputable study has shown any success of gun control law -or intervention- in reducing crime, or in the supply of guns to criminals or even of increasing public safety.

Thus, when Mnisi says the last amnesty "was an unqualified success", the only success that can be attributed is one of ripping firearms from the hands of little old ladies, vermin hunters and law-abiding people not inclined to crime. Mnisi has failed to reveal how this "unqualified success" made absolutely no dent in the crime rate and violent, contact-crime has actually increased. Possibly Mr. Mnisi doesn't understand the meaning of "unqualified success", perhaps it has a different meaning to the SAPS.

It would be far better if Mnisi would offer the public and the SAPS some insight and validity to his claims of firearms being an important part of police work by predicting the actual reduction of crime expected and the number of criminals which will be punished by this, proposed amnesty. This should be easy to calculate from the results of ‘unqualified successes” of previous amnesties.

With the Police's firearms division in total chaos and backlogged to who knows when with licence applications, one would have thought a light may have finally come on in government circles but not unlike Eskom, it obviously hasn't. Instead of a firearm amnesty, what's needed is a complete re-think of the Firearms Control Act, to slash the administrative workload of the SAPS down to the actual value of this legislation. The SAPS and public have no idea of the worth in terms of crime-fighting and public safety that this Act is supposed to offer.

Any important and large expenditure by the SAPS needs to be evaluated and the results made known to the public. Why have the SAPS never disclosed the total cost and return value of their gun control policy and when will Mnisi give these figures to convince the people the SAPS are indeed doing a good job of increasing public safety and are not just sacrificing law-abiding citizens lives and overall safety to mere ideological fantasy.


BGOASA Research

http://www.bgoasa.co.za/