South Africa used to be a fairly safe place to be. Oh, it had problems, to be sure, and Apartheid wasn’t a good thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it was at least safe. It was the jewel of Africa, despite the shortcomings, which says about as much about most of Africa as it does about South Africa in particular.
These days, though, it’s not. It’s a violent third-world nation that can’t seem to get its act in gear in any useful way. In other words, now it’s like most of the continent.
No, that’s not a good thing.
One thing South Africa has, though, despite its massive violent crime rate, is gun registration, and guess what? It doesn’t work for crap.
South Africa’s gun violence crisis has reached devastating proportions, with about 33 people shot dead every day.
Yet, the very system meant to prevent legal firearms from leaking into criminal hands, the Central Firearms Registry (CFR), is buckling under dysfunction, corruption, and neglect.
The CFR was established to maintain accurate records tracing every gun “from cradle to grave,” but years of mismanagement, missing files, and outdated technology have turned it into a weak link in the country’s fight against crime.
Gun Free SA research and policy analyst Claire Taylor said accurate firearm record-keeping is recognised globally as a cornerstone of effective gun control – and is required under several international small arms control protocols to which South Africa is a signatory.
“South Africa’s Central Firearms Registry has never functioned properly,” Taylor said.
“The fundamental problem is that record-keeping has been treated as an administrative burden rather than what it actually is: a critical crime-fighting tool. Deploying resources to build a functional system has never been prioritised – with catastrophic consequences for public safety.”
Now, I get what Taylor is saying here, and she’s not entirely wrong that incompetence and corruption combine to make any attempt at gun registration futile at best, but I think she’s also missing one very important thing here.
Criminals aren’t going to register their guns.
The entire continent of Africa is rife with illicit gun deals. Every wannabe warlord is able to get pretty much any weapon system he wants, so long as he’s got the money for it. The only reason we don’t see more top-tier weapons in those hands is simply that they lack the money to pay for them. I’m sure someone we sold some of our better stuff to would be happy to send it there for the right price. It’s just no one has it.
With an environment like that, though, how do you really think that gun registration would somehow stop bad people from getting guns, even without graft, corruption, and poor technical capabilities?
Now, let’s think about the people who say they want gun registration here. They, like Taylor, believe that gun registration is essential for gun control to be effective, so they want to implement it on American shores.
We’ve got a lot of people who wouldn’t register our guns on general principle, but we’ve also got a lot of guns on the black market that will never be registered.
How does registration “from cradle to grave” work when there are sources for guns that have never entered the system in the first place? How does it work when those guns can be taken from lawful owners? Criminals are going to register their stolen property with the government for what I hope are obvious reasons. If they’re not obvious to you, you’re too stupid to breathe without help.
Taylor’s sin here is that she’s too enamored with gun registration to recognize that no matter what other issues are at play, it was always going to fail, no matter what the country did.
Editor’s Note: After more than 40 days of screwing Americans, a few Dems have finally caved. The Schumer Shutdown was never about principle—just inflicting pain for political points.
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