Cape Town - SAPS and metro police are continuously confiscating illegal guns from criminals and on Tuesday even from an 13-year-old boy caught with a gun in Cravenby allegedly on his way to school to threaten another pupil.
The proliferation of illegal guns have seen a spike in gun murders on the Cape Flats, but on Tuesday Premier Alan Winde and Minister of Community Safety Albert Fritz released a joint statement celebrating the decline in deaths by gun violence this past weekend as a result of the deployment of the army. Of the 41 murders over the weekend, 16 were caused by gun violence, the lowest number in 10 weeks.
Winde is working on a holistic approach to solving the problem of gun violence.
“As the provincial government, which does not have a constitutional mandate to conduct enforcement operations, we are working on a longer-term plan to address the root causes of crime, by stimulating more economic opportunities and ramping up the delivery of services.”
The Western Cape has faced major problems in the past with gun violence. According to Lizette Lancaster of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), firearms contribute to 41% of murders in South Africa, a number which is even higher in Gauteng and the Western Cape.
Fritz offered three suggestions for curbing gun violence in the province.
He called for SAPS to restrict the sale of ammunition and cartridges to dealers, develop an electronic tracking system for firearms linked to the Central Firearm Register and Minister of Community Safety and develop a Provincial Firearm and Ammunition Control Act to allow for provinces to interfere in illegal activities surrounding firearms.
Claire Taylor, a senior researcher at Gun Free SA, has been following the growing epidemic of gun violence in the province for years.
“The Western Cape is a powerful example of what can happen when there is an influx of guns.”
Here she is referring to the case of Christiaan Prinsloo, a former senior police officer who was convicted in 2016 of peddling 2400 firearms to gangsters over a period of eight years.
Prinsloo’s scheme resulted in 1066 murders, including the deaths of 89 children. The most recent data available indicates that only 888 of those 2400 smuggled weapons have been recovered by the police. Prinsloo had access to the cache of weapons as part of the SAPS firearm destruction programme. Firearms that are recovered from crime scenes, confiscated from illegal carriers or forfeited to SAPS by people who no longer want them are supposed to be destroyed.
Data from the ISS shows the three main avenues for guns entering the illegal market are fraud and corruption, smuggling, and loss and theft.
Guns involved with criminal activities are usually purchased legally and then reacquired through illegal means.
@m_wench