The Central Firearm Registry (CFR) has been with South Africa for a long time, certainly for the entirety of most firearm owner lives. Almost all of us therefore just accept it as gospel, without knowing anything about it. ‘It was always here, and therefore always will be’. Virtually nobody truly understands its purpose, nor how it came to exist. We will explore CFR’s origins in this article and hopefully show some appreciation for it.
While CFR officially begins with the Arms and Ammunition Act 75 of 1969, its roots go back further to Act 28 of 1937 (of the same name). This 1937 Act was the first centralised firearm law in South Africa, as each of the four provinces each had their own laws (all dating from pre-1910). What was the reason for centralising and consolidating these laws? Quite simply, concerns about black people possessing firearms.
The Arms and Ammunition Act 28 of 1937
If you go and read the parliament Hansard (the record of debates), it is made very easy. The relevant minister (the Minister of Justice for the context of 1937, although the Defence Minister led the debate) introduced the law in very clear and simple terms. Read it for yourself:
“I understand from the Minister of Justice that it has become urgent to put the Bill through. I was under the impression that it was not so urgent, but he called my attention to the fact that the danger is greater of the natives getting hold of firearms and committing crimes with them. There have been some cases according to my information which would not have taken place if we had a Bill of this kind on the statute book. The native has firearms and under this Bill we shall easily be able to inquire into the origin of them, which we could not do in the past.”
If you need any further convincing about how discriminatory the intentions of this law are, this is what the author (Rev. CWM du Toit) of the 1937 Act had to say:
“I may just add to what the Minister has said that I do not believe there is anything really contentious in this Bill. The select committee gave a good deal of attention to it, and I support the Bill as it stands. There are definite provisions in the Bill, while in the past different provisions existed in the provinces, which we have now altered so as to apply throughout the Union. The position is as the Minister has stated it. There is a prohibition here against natives possessing firearms in any part of the Union.”
To make this possible, a register needed to be created. Since magistrates issued licences (not the police), each magistrate needed to keep detailed records of the licences they issued. The registry was therefore decentralised. The quoted purpose of the register was ‘to inquire into the origin’ of a firearm found at a crime scene. It was believed that knowing where the firearm initially came from would make it easier to solve crimes. If it is not already clear, it is specifically for crimes committed by black people using firearms.
This discrimination intent is inherent to the time in history we are looking at. The year of 1933 was a consequential year for South Africa and its ongoing industrialisation, with the coalition Fusion Government between Smuts and Hertzog. Hertzog would be quoted sometime around 1936 as saying “The native, as long as he remains a danger to civilization in South Africa, has no right to expect the white man to assist and support him.” How could a ‘danger’ to civilisation be allowed to own firearms? They could not, at least in Hertzog’s mind.
A senior advisor to Hertzog would also be quoted as saying:
“If we lose our colour feeling and the non-Europeans are developed and civilized, we must become a coloured nation…There is only one policy to follow if you wish…to remain a European race in South Africa, and that is to follow a policy of separation between the races…Yes, our attitude is that the Europeans must remain masters in South Africa.”
Again, it is difficult to justify black firearm ownership if you also believe this. The colonial era showed very clearly that firearm ownership grants enormous political power. While blacks had been thoroughly disarmed towards the end of the colonial era, there were concerns that this was being reversed. As mentioned by someone else in the parliament debate:
“I quite agree that the possession of firearms is becoming much more a problem than it used to be some years ago. Disarmament of the natives took place when they came under European rule, and the more reliable chiefs were subsequently granted the use of firearms very sparingly. Notwithstanding that, it is disquieting to find many natives in possession of firearms…”
The Arms and Ammunition Act 75 of 1969
It became clear by the 1960s that the magistrate registers were not helpful if a firearm was stolen or lost in a place like Cape Town and found at a crime scene in Johannesburg. The two registers were not linked, and were almost guaranteed to be out of date. Owners could not be relied upon to notify the magistrate of changes in address or other details. The law needed to be centralised even further. The 1969 Act created a centralised registry, and this is the CFR that still lives with South Africa today.
Firearm offences were increasing every year and this concerned the government, especially firearm losses. A rebuttable presumption of negligence was already placed upon firearm owners from 1956 for losing a firearm, and it became illegal to not report a loss within 48 hours in 1988 (later reduced to 24 hours). This increasing control was necessary to preserve the accuracy and integrity of the CFR. The entire system was being built to serve the CFR.
With the start of the border war and increasingly totalitarian apartheid policy and repression, the government’s enemies were multiplying. Despite ostensibly legitimate concerns about cross-border ‘terrorist’ infiltration, the government had also alienated and pushed non-violent political movements such as the ANC into the arms of violent rebellion. Dr AB Xuma (South Africa’s first black medical doctor) would be the last of the ANC ‘old guard’ leadership who had chosen non-violent resistance and civil disobedience.
As the apartheid state became more violent and repressive, ANC members became disillusioned with Xuma’s tactics. Militant methods acquired more and more favour, and the ANC subsequently experienced a communist takeover through young and enthusiastic leaders such as Mandela when Xuma was replaced.
Crime and punishment
Industrialisation and urbanisation also creates socio-economic conditions for criminal activity. Apartheid’s policy of top-down enforced total separation was completely unsuited to complex and modern economies. The National Party desired a modern economy, but rejected the modern social rules such an economy required: freedom of choice of where to live and work. The problem began to increasingly morph from one of ‘black people and firearms threaten the political order’, to ‘black people and firearms cause crime’, to ‘black people are the reason for the explosion of crime’.
As crime got worse, the government decided it wanted to know why this was happening. The result was the Viljoen Commission of 1976 to investigate the concept of minimum sentencing as a way to deter crime. The Commission was scathing of the government: by sending thousands of blacks to jail for tiny and non-violent offences such as pass-law and curfew violations, it became normal for a black person to have spent at least some time in prison.
Imprisonment needs to create a social stigma that society frowns upon if it is to deter crime. The apartheid policy had completely backfired: the threat of imprisonment had lost all of its power. If a black person had not been jailed at some point in their life, it was almost like there was something wrong with them.
With the increasing collapse of the criminal justice system (not helped by removing police foot patrols in favour of vehicle patrols), made worse by increasingly violent resistance, the government began to panic. Firearm losses also began to explode in the late 1980s (for an unknown reason), and the government began to panic with the entire system of firearm control had completely collapsed. This hysteria deserves a separate article to discuss it.
Firearms Control Act 60 of 2000
The Firearms Control Act’s parliament debates also make it clear what this new law was supposed to achieve. At the time, South Africa was coming down off extremely high rates of violent crime, but the FCA’s origins lay in 1996 when these rates were at their highest. CFR records were identified as so extremely out of date as to be borderline useless (assuming they were of any use to begin with), that the entire licence system needed an audit.
This audit became the main reason for not having a grandfather clause of old licences. The re-integration of the homeland states and independence of Namibia gave further reason for re-licensing. We will ignore the fact that violent crime was coming down sharply by 2000 despite CFR’s huge problems, which included corruption.
Considering that the government never sought to do anything about the 2009 SA Hunters interdict protects green card licences, we need to ask how much of a problem is an inaccurate CFR really? Clearly not a very big problem because as should be clear by now: CFR exists to punish firearm owners, not control or prevent violent crime. Even now, violent crime is at its worst levels since 1995, and an official government report says that the FCA as a whole (and CFR by extension) has a limited effect at best on crime.
Conclusion
The origins of CFR are clearly vested in racism and discrimination. The gun control that was meant to prevent black firearm ownership at the end of the colonial era had failed. The 1937 Act was meant to correct this, and also failed. The 1969 Act was meant to correct this too. It also failed, and total hysteria about firearm losses and violent crime became the norm by the 1990s. Looking into the future, I will say that the Firearms Control Act was meant to fix this too. Spoiler alert: it failed from Day 1 and is still failing.
Inherent to all of this control was the idea that CFR could help solve violent crimes. It is very unclear how knowing where a firearm was stolen helps to prove a crime. At best, it is circumstantial evidence, and the more times the stolen firearm changes hands, the more irrelevant CFR becomes. This is assuming the firearm was at any point stolen from or lost by a licenced person in the first place. The entire concept of ‘control’ via CFR is hubris at best, and we would be much better placed to spend the money on actual policing. While CFR may very well have a purpose, that requires a separate discussion if we can be clear about what CFR’s purpose is not: preventing and investigating violent crime.
What we can clearly see is that CFR was created because the 1937 government did not trust its black subjects to own firearms (they were not citizens). Nor did it trust its white citizens to not indirectly provide firearms to blacks. If you have read any of our previous articles on gun control during the colonial era, this should not surprise you (follow these links to read about the 1870s Confederation Project, the Cape Frontier Wars, the Langalibalele Affair, the BaSotho War of the Gun, and Citizenship and the Second Anglo-Boer War). The 1969 government continued this distrust. Even after 1994, the government still did not trust any of its citizens (as evidenced by the hyper-control of the FCA from 2000). As far as the government is concerned, firearm ownership is worthy of suspicion, regardless of who the owner is.