This article about the state of the South African firearm community is written from the heart. It is intended to articulate the good and the bad so that we can take the initiative and create a future that we can all be proud of. In it, the author diagnoses what he sees as the root cause of our collective inability to move forward, and what we can do to fix it.
Everyone and everything everywhere, has problems. More often than not, these problems can be overcome and learned from. Just by looking at the state of South Africa, this is fairly self-evident, although for now we should just be content with learning rather than solving considering how that dumpster fire is going. Do not be discouraged though, because things are changing. This article is not about South Africa though, but rather one of its key constituencies: the firearm community.
I do not refer to the ‘firearm community’ in some form of kum-bah-ya way. Indeed, I don’t expect too many people to like me for what I have to say below. People do not need to like me though, because we can only solve problems if we can first identify them. I will try to articulate the problems as I see them, and also solutions (lest anyone criticise me for not being constructive).
If I were to diagnose the state of the firearm community, it would be somewhere in between ‘great’ and ‘terrible’: it is okay. It has the ability to defend what we have, but do not expect it to win new ground. It simply does not have the ability to do that. To its great disadvantage, neither is there any palpable desire to even try win new ground. I believe this is more because it simply has no idea where to even begin, let alone any idea of how to carry such an effort forward. It is essentially paralysed, yet retains a strong immune system. This does create a risk though, because if the immune system fails, so does everything else.
There is a palpable lack of enthusiasm to do anything except rally around existential threats (such as FCA amendments), but as soon as the threat is gone, so is the enthusiasm. We should not overlook the fact that a lot also happens in meeting rooms behind closed doors, but this is not ‘rights’ based. It is in the name of commercial interest. Benefits for the broader community are a bonus, not the purpose. I am not alone in sharing this frustration, but there is either no interest to take the responsibility to change things, or little idea how to even make a start (paralysed by indecision).
What I write below is the result of two significant things. The first is the result of my ten-years of involvement in the firearm community. I know the personalities involved, and I can say I have played a role during my time of formal involvement (however small). I learned a lot, but I also felt that I often lacked enough knowledge to really make a name for myself. For the most part, I followed. Despite not always working out or necessarily being the most productive, I left no scars of my own, nor was I scarred. I did identify and learn of ‘threads’ in this time: opportunities and gaps for the cause of firearm rights as a whole.
Collective ignorance of our history
An enormous gap was our collective ignorance of history: absolutely nobody had a whole and coherent understanding of the history of gun control in South Africa. If such a person exists, it is news to me. Indeed, my LLD on the history of gun control in South Africa from the colonial era to present day is designed to fix this huge shortcoming. No such research has ever been done before. As much as many can muse and opine on the topic, it is nominal or incomplete at best, and their scope of reference is tiny (it might include the text of the 1969 Act, and passing knowledge of the 1937 Act if we are lucky!).
My LLD fixes this by critically diving into the black letter text of the laws from the 1790s right through to 2025. It does this by considering the social circumstances of the time, and trying to understand the deeper motivations of the drafters. I can therefore say with great confidence that Ecclesiastes 1:9 is correct: “What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (NIV). The FCA’s roots lie in Natal gun control from 1847, and I have collaborated with Fortis Pro to discuss the themes of my research in YouTube video format. These videos are based on articles on the FPC’s own blog.
The final result of my LLD research is what I call ‘the control rationale’. I want to be clear: South Africa as a whole has only experienced the same firearm laws since the 1870s, largely rooted in Natal law from the 1840s. The Cape was at least different until 1878 before it also bought into the control rationale. Understanding the control rationale is how we understand our past, and become able to plot our future.
Our problem of private law vs public law
Another gap was the appreciation, or total lack thereof, of our constitutional dispensation. This is perhaps the criticism I have been most apprehensive about sharing, lest I be criticised for being ignorant and a know-it-all, especially because of the passionate commitment by many legal professionals to help our cause either free of charge or at discount. There can however be no holy cows if we want to do better, but this does not take away from the sacrifices made. I now feel much more confident about airing my views, because this is perhaps both a cause and symptom of many problems.
In my ten years of involvement in the South African firearm community, I never once heard anyone, from any organisation, try and articulate what our actual problems are. I cannot take all the credit for articulating it the way I do, because other people share it as well. They are not even always firearm owners, nor is it always firearm related.
I need to refer to a comment that Martin van Staden made in criticism of the DA and its iffy commitment to functional federalism and power devolution, because the sentiment applies to the firearm community more broadly as well. Martin said that the reason the DA sometimes struggles with finding the willpower to litigate against the executive government, is because they are trapped in a bubble. This bubble limits their thinking and discourages innovation and risk taking.
What is the bubble? This bubble is the cold, clinical, and corporate nature of the beast that is the DA. In turn, it relies on ‘private law’ attorneys to advise it of issues involving state power. Private law deals with you problems (property, wills, divorce, contract, delict, etc.) and is joked about as being the easiest law to pass in an LLB because of its ‘parrot’ nature: repeat verbatim what the textbook says, and you are through. Despite private law being my weakest subject (I am not a parrot), I agree with the sentiment.
The opposite of private law is of course ‘public law’ and focuses more on us problems for society as a whole (criminal, constitutional, administrative, etc.). Public law most definitely does not lend itself to a parrot learning strategy, and all of my best results are here (probably because I am not a parrot). Whereas Martin described private law as rigid/closed and cold (mercantile/corporate law is similar), he describes public law as open-ended, warm, and innovative. Anyone can practice private law if they tick the boxes of already-settled questions, but public law requires constant scepticism and desire to push the boundaries and both ask and answer new questions.
Public law and litigation
To navigate the public law domain requires a highly innovative and creative mind. My LLB learning journey made this plain as day. Several landmark Constitutional Court judgements showed this when discussing the arguments of the parties in the dispute. It was always abundantly clear when the lawyers for one side were relying on by-now defunct and deprecated legal principles. It was clear that they had no idea what the rules of the game were, and were arguing as if it was 1988 before we had a constitution. As the Constitutional Court developed a jurisprudence and time went on, this became less and less of a problem, but it still happened.
There is a lot to be critical about when it comes to how the Constitutional Court reasons and rules on various topics. I would describe judgements as being decided on a 60/40 basis: 40% consideration for legal principles, and 60% consideration for political considerations. Professor Koos Malan makes this very clear in his writings and lectures: superior courts (in any country) are de facto part of the governing elite. They are by definition aloof and out of touch with the problems of everyday people.
Public law expertise and the firearm community
How does this all relate to the firearm community? For one, firearm rights advocacy is not a full-time occupation for anyone (yet). The community is sustained by the passionate involvement of its members who already have full time occupations that require their full attention. It is a passion-project at best. Someone like Martin Hood is perhaps an exception and his dedication is patently obvious, but even he is bound by the demands of his full-time job. He is just fortunate that his full-time job allows generous leeway to also get involved with firearm rights issues when they crop up. His FCA knowledge is certainly the best there is.
The second problem is one of legal expertise. Even though we have many involved in this struggle, we have very few law experts. We have even fewer law experts that received a post-1994 constitutional education. We have even fewer law experts with post-1994 constitutional education that work in public law. We have even fewer still such experts that have an interest in firearms: basically zero (excluding myself, I do not know of a single one). We make do with what we have though, and it has been enough to defend the status quo.
What do we have though? To my knowledge, virtually every single notable legal professional involved in the firearms advocacy space is a private lawyer. They have the tools to be very knowledgeable about the black-letter text of the FCA, but they will struggle to articulate the South African constitution in anything more than a nominal sense. Even if they have a vague understanding the how the Constitutional Court thinks, I believe that they would also struggle even more to articulate it to any meaningful extent.
Evidence of our failures
I am not trying to be critical for the sake of being critical. We all have our blind spots, and this is a big one. If anyone disagrees with me, the fact that SA Hunters 2017/2018 and GOSA 2018/2021 were such significant defeats prove my point: the expired licence issue needed to go to court, but the way those specific cases were framed should not have happened. There are some nuances, and the courts did make mistakes, but my broader point is that the expired licence issue from 2016 was a factually open and shut case: doctrine of legitimate expectations. Nobody went for this, and if they did, it was abandoned early on (inexcusably so).
Instead, SA Hunters challenged the constitutionality of technical provisions that were never unconstitutional in and of themselves (unless you also challenge the FCA’s entire rationale they are founded upon, not that SA Hunters did this). GOSA went for a truly bizarre legal strategy that wanted the courts to blatantly violate the separation of powers doctrine, so of course it lost. Judge Prinsloo correctly identified the issue that GOSA was dancing around without directly arguing it (legitimate expectations), but the framing meant that it was extremely easy for the Supreme Court of Appeal to overturn it with prejudice.
Fidelity carried us over the finish line, but even there it is an imperfect victory considering how unnecessary it was. Nonetheless, congratulations to the people involved, especially the friends of the court such as Sakeliga. I remain convinced that Sakeliga’s submissions sealed Fidelity’s success, and we are all better off after Fidelity.
A summary of our problems
Problem number one is that we have no full-time commitments to firearm policy advocacy and legal research. Problem number two is that we have no full-time public law experts with a commitment to firearm policy and legal research. Problem number three is that nobody understands the control rationale lying at the root of our problem. While I may be an exception to this third problem, I only became an exception as of 2025 with the final draft of my LLD. It is not like I have been sitting on this golden nugget of knowledge while also criticising others for their lack of knowledge.
This is not to say that everyone else in the community is clueless. I believe that many, if not most of them, would be able to vaguely articulate something insightful if really pressed and made to think. Unfortunately, when one of them goes onto national television or radio and says ‘the FCA is good law just badly administered’, it is further evidence of this bubble thinking. When anyone talks about ‘fix the illegal firearms’, they do not know what they are actually trying to articulate. You can see what I mean here about this topic here: ‘Illegal firearms’ and the power of language: how firearm owners lose
There is no desire whatsoever to push the envelope and aspire to anything greater than the status quo. The aforementioned court cases are definitely not examples that contradict me. In fact, they support the core of my argument: we are not creative or passionate enough. ‘If we can keep what we have, that is the best we can hope for’. This is a defeatist mindset.
What we have is definitely not a terrible deal. Yes, nearly all of the FCA is arbitrary. I would even argue that the FCA is part of the reason for the collapse of legal legitimacy in South African society as a whole. You can read what scholars like Anthony Allot and Jeroen Koomans have to say if this interests you, and I have a list of more such names. I have nearly 40,000 words in a draft text discussing the whole concept of legal effectiveness as far as the FCA is concerned.
Related to this issue of understanding the control rationale, is understanding the principles of legal effectiveness. Legal effectiveness is almost never discussed in the South African context, and the FCA would be a front and centre poster-child example if it was. It is a very well-developed legal principle in some foreign countries, but severely under-developed in South Africa. This is a failure of academia more than the firearm community.
Solving the problems
Contrary to the pessimism of many, our problems can be solved. We certainly have the resources and the passion, but organising and coordinating the two remains our great conundrum. It is however a doable exercise.
Problems number one and two can be solved at the same time (legal experts with constitutional litigation knowledge). We are making huge progress with problem three thanks to my LLD research, which will be distributed to anyone willing to read it. We cannot solve the first two problems without solving the third problem. Once my research is in final form, the community as a whole will have something to use as a starting point for how to carry the South African firearm cause forward.
There are two other problems, one small and one enormous by its significance. Starting with the smaller problem, the FCA has a lot of vested interests. Even if the entire firearm community is on the same page in terms of knowledge and knowing what we need to do to repeal or abolish the FCA, there is a risk of sabotage or undermining the effort. I refer to all the lost ‘business’ opportunities made possible (or even required) by the FCA’s inherent arbitrariness.
Clubs have a captive market for anyone who wants more than two handguns/four firearms/a semi-auto long gun. Motivation writing services are a cottage industry all by themselves, most of them kept alive by the myth that only they can divine what CFR needs in a motivation. While some ‘services’ ask for proof of vehicle registration (???), I motivated an AR15 using four sentences on the SAPS 271 form, and my licence was approved within 36 working days.
The loss of shameless provisions like motivation requirements would be no loss at all. Indeed, the more principled people that make money from motivations would support getting rid of the requirement. We need to be aware and sensitive to the need to explain how a truly thriving firearm industry would mean that clubs should not fear loss of members. I struggle to see why I would cancel my club membership just because the firearm limits fall away.
The other problem I mention is more of an example of abject failure by the firearm community as a whole: poor firearm owners (mostly black and coloured) in a broad sense are factually unrepresented, and nobody has even tried to mobilise them, let alone reach out. This is absolutely unforgiveable, and also why the FPC has made tentative steps to penetrate this completely untapped sector of society.
Why? Townships are scary, sure, but they stand to both gain and lose the most depending on the direction of firearm law: almost nobody is more at risk of violent crime than these people, and they have as much right as anybody else to own a firearm. Another reason is ‘how would we reach them and what on earth would we say to them?’. These are valid points, but still does not excuse our neglect of broadening our base (it is not like we tried).
Another failure is that we have demanded shockingly little from our political leaders and the parties we vote for. The DA and VF+ both say that they support private firearm ownership. Woohoo! Okay, now tell me what this actually means. You can’t. Nobody can. Nobody knows. Not even they know. If you asked them to give concrete details on what such a law should look like in their minds, they have no idea, and anything they did say would be based on the toxic thing that is the FCA. Their official position is the vague, ethereal, and wishy-washy words of ‘we support private firearm ownership subject to regulation’. This means nothing, but it is at least a starting point.
How do we move forward?
Step one: understand the control rationale. This means where and when it started, how it damaged South Africa, and why it was such a reprehensible concept. It also means accepting that we have uncritically regurgitated and consumed it every day since 1878, and that we need to move away form it.
Step two: create a narrative that excites people. South African history is replete with inspiring stories surrounding firearms and good vs bad. The Cape Frontier Wars (whatever you may think of them), Majuba, the Langalibalele Affair, BaSotho Gun War, Second Anglo-Boer War. There is something for nearly everybody to be inspired by, using relatable stories with principles that cut across group identities. We need a uniquely South African firearm culture, similar to how many Americans rally around the cultural significance of the Second Amendment. Make firearm ownership ‘common’ and normal, even based on desirable principles such as self-responsibility. Our opponents have worked very hard at stigmatising firearm ownership.
Step three: take the gospel of pew to the masses and build a political support base. Make firearm ownership a continuous and contemporary political issue sustained by passion in what it represents.
Conclusion
If the firearm community agree on the universal right to own a firearm (and there are many ways to frame this without using the word ‘firearm’), we can start to talk about how we should regulate this right. What should it look like? How should this right be reasonably limited and who should be excluded? What is the message we want to send to broader society when we say ‘I own a firearm’? South Africa is changing very fast, and the future is ours for the taking. The question is, do we want to take it?
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