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Irish-Qhobosheane, Jenni. 2021 ‘Diversion of Legal Civilian Firearms.’ How to Silence the Guns? Southern Africa's Illegal Firearms Markets, pp. 16-19. Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Geneva. 19 October

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Diversion of legal civilian firearms

Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa all have relatively comprehensive legislation to regulate the civilian ownership of legal firearms. However, only South Africa publishes official information on the number of firearms lost or stolen from legal owners. Of the three countries, and indeed within the SADC region as a whole, South Africa has the largest number of legally held civilian firearms. In July 2019, the South African police reported that these numbered 2,582,656.

Police statistics show that between 2013/14 and 2018/19, more than 47,028 licensed civilian firearms were reported lost or stolen. During the same period, police recovered 28 891 of them, leaving 18,137 unaccounted for, which are likely to be in the hands of criminals.

While this figure may seem relatively high, the reality is that the number of lost and stolen civilian firearms may be significantly higher than what has been reported to the police. A 2015 presentation on the Firearms Control Act showed that between 2003 and 2014, about 20,291 civilian-owned firearms were recovered that had never been reported as lost or stolen by their owners. This figure included 19,143 firearms licensed to private individuals, 381 firearms licensed to businesses or nongovernmental institutions and 767 licensed to firearm dealers.

[…] In South Africa, the Director of the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSIRA), told Parliament that although the regulatory authority did not know the exact number of firearms active in the security industry, a 2013/14 desktop audit conducted by PSIRA showed that there were 3,340 registered security companies that were licensed to possess firearms and 101,000 firearm licences within the industry.

The risks associated with the regulatory authority's inability to track firearms within the private security industry was raised in interviews conducted with people linked to taxi violence in Gauteng. At least two interviewees claimed that they were able to unlawfully access firearms from people engaged in private security services and were able to buy these legally obtained weapons once companies no longer had any use for them

ID: Q14658

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