By Carien du Plessis
The DA has reacted with fury to a suggestion by President Jacob Zuma that South African civilians should not bear arms.
After months of tough talk on the need for police to shoot to defend themselves, Zuma told supporters at an ANC Siyabonga ("thank you") rally at Lenyenye stadium near Tzaneen on Sunday, that the country's gun laws needed review.
"We are worried that in this country that has so many levels of violent crime, (there are) too many guns in the hands of citizens," he said."We need to take a look at the law, at whether we should all have guns.
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'By having so many guns, you only help criminals' "By having so many guns, you only help criminals. We should look at the way all of us are armed in this country," Zuma said, to lukewarm applause from the crowd of people almost filling the small stadium, who had waited for two hours in scorching heat to hear him speak.
Speaking in English after joking that his "Zu-Pedi" was not great, Zuma said if people had guns, criminals tended to steal them and used them to commit crime.
The same thing happened with guns used by police, Zuma said, but he did not spell out how the government planned to deal with the loss of police guns - estimated at about 7 000 over the past three years.
DA police spokesperson Dianne Kohler Barnard said Zuma was displaying "ignorance" about guns and gun laws and "leading people astray". She said police had indicated that 106 percent of civilian guns that went missing in the past year had been recovered, suggesting that they had recovered all these guns plus those that had gone missing in previous years.
However, only 15 percent of police guns that disappeared were recovered. Last year alone 2 944 police guns went missing.
"The country is not awash with criminals holding civilian guns, but with criminals holding police guns," Kohler Barnard said. "Zuma's statement is a very concerted attack on civilians. We must just sit in our homes unarmed while they (the criminals) come with police guns to kill us," she said.
Zuma on Sunday also reiterated that police should shoot criminals before criminals could shoot them.
"Once a criminal takes out a gun, the police must know their lives are in danger and they should act accordingly," he said.
Zuma said he was aware that some human rights activists disagreed with his tough stance on crime.
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This article was originally published on page 2 of Daily News on October 26, 2009
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