PARLIAMENT, March 15 (ANA) – It emerged on Wednesday a cabinet approved firearms amnesty which was meant to be implemented from April 1 would be delayed as MPs won’t have enough time to process and endorse the move.
Police Minister Nathi Nhleko and police top brass presented details of the National Firearms Amnesty to Parliament’s portfolio committee on police, saying the amnesty was approved for a period of six months to “close the gap on firearms related crimes”.
Last week, crime statistics between April 1, and December 31 last year, almost all contact crimes had seen a decrease except robbery with aggravating circumstances (up 6.1 percent). The so-called trio crimes had remained stubbornly high – carjacking were up 14.9 percent, business robberies by 6.5 percent, and house robberies by 5.3 percent.
Nhleko cited two previous amnesty periods, which allows people with illegal guns to hand in their firearms at police stations without prosecution, unless they were used in the commission of a crime, had yielded positive results.
In 2005, 33,823 firearms and 608,794 rounds of ammunition were taken out of circulation, while in 2010, 11, 887 illegal firearms and 30,442 voluntarily surrendered firearms were removed from the streets.
SA Police Service head of strategic management Leon Rabie said several systems had to be put in place before the amnesty could be put in effect. People could hand in their guns to a police officer on duty at a police station, who must issue the a receipt for the firearms and ammunition.
Better record keeping and monitoring systems need to be put in place to prevent the risk of firearms going missing.
Rabie said clear time frames for destruction have to be set, but before that the firearms would be ballistically tested to check whether they were not used in the commission of a crime.
The guns would then be sent to a provincial storage facility, before “emergency transport services” took the guns to the national storage facility where it will ultimately be destroyed.
MPs welcomed the move, but said in terms of the Firearms Control Act the notice of an amnesty needed to be approved by Parliament first, and this was unlikely to happen by April 1.
“The amnesty which is intended to reduce the circulation of illegally possessed firearms was scheduled to commence from 1 April until 30 September 2017, but this does not seem possible because the Committee’s report on the matter is likely to be tabled in the National Assembly in May 2017 when Parliament returns from the two-week recess,” said committee spokesman Francois Beukman.
MPs welcomed improved record keeping endeavours to ensure the efficient handling of the the process.
“In this regard, the Committee said SAPS should ensure security vetting of all officials that will be responsible for these firearms, to ensure integrity of the process.”
– African News Agency (ANA)
