This week’s Talkback question on the Mail & Guardian Online:
Gun-happy SA: Have the police failed us?
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Have your say by leaving a comment below.
This week’s Talkback question on the Mail & Guardian Online:
Gun-happy SA: Have the police failed us?
Read more
Have your say by leaving a comment below.
Police, under the leadership of suspect Selebi, has failed us a long time ago. That is why 33% of SA population is ordinary citizen, 33% is criminal and 33% is -one way or another- involved in security.
This makes people feel entitled to walk around armed. If arms license control is as effective as drivers license controls, we might have a lot of clowns on our roads with no mental nor physical controls on the use of their fire arm. Very few sharp shooters amongst them. The outcome of such shootings is like Russian roulette.
Yes, the police let us down so badly that ordinary people walk around armed with lethal weapons the use of which they cannot control.
This issue goes way beyond police “failing us”. That this nation and all its peoples have been failed is indisputable. But we have been failed, misled, deceived, conned, deprived, chained … and so, so much more.
Firstly, we have been failed by the very people and organisations we chose to help us achieve our dreams. That is the dismal failure called the State (inseparable from the duplicitous bunch of criminals and amoral people called the ANC).
Secondly, we have been failed by the international community which has treated us like a child prostitute. They have paid to abuse our bodies and we have become so desensitised to the abuse that we have come to accept rape as nothing more than a necessity for survival.
Thirdly, we have been failed by our soci-economic system where we have swallowed all the bullshit fed us like a homeless man at a pie-tossing contest. Everyone from the receiver of revenue, to the banks, to the giant conglomerates, to the media houses have their turn with us – or at least what the international rapists’ sloppy seconds.
And then we have been failed by the very institutions that were entrusted to protect us. The police are only a part – incompetent, corrupt and disinterested. Then there are the courts (ditto), the prosecutors, lawyers (the difference between dead ones in the road and dead dogs are the skid marks before the dogs), and the law makers interested exclkusivgely in self-preservation at any cost and fuck the Constitution if it got in the way. And they have been supported and cossetted by all the ill-begotten and misguided mother-grundies behind gun control and blanket amnesties and molly-coddling prisons and rehabilitation twaddle and gentle tapping on the wrist of the naughty ones. Oh deary me! Ag shame!
This complex, cesspit of genetic misfits and evolutionary throwbacks have willingly (if sometimes unwittingly) been complicit in the confederacy of dunces that have brought us to the sorry state we’re in today.
Yes, we’re gun happy. We’re also knife happy, sword happy, drug happy, rape happy, abuse happy and crime happy. We’re so happy we could shit.
In New Zealand all handguns are, by default, illegal. The only way you can get a gun licence to own a pistol or revolver is to be a paid-up member of a legally-accredited and annually police-appraised pistol club. Your membership, and your handgun licence, expires if you fail to submit a certain number of 6-monthly shooting targets, dated and attested by two sworn club assessors to prove that you really are a bona-fide competitive handgun shooter. The police will call on you to impound your handgun if you fail to sustain your club membership and/or submit your six-monthly targets.
It’s far too much of a hassle unless you’re a really keen pistolero, so hardly anyone owns a handgun.
If you declare that you want to own a handgun for “self-defence”, you’re automatically and instantly declared unfit to own one.
Far more gun-owners own rifles and shotguns and they’re used for hunting deer, vermin or game-birds. But large rifles are quite hard to conceal and to use surreptitiously in committing a crime, unlike a revolver in your pocket.
Even the police are unarmed and, if a suspect is thought to be armed, the policeman retreats and the Armed Offender Squad is called in to deal with the situation.
Gun crime is consequently very, very low. “Aggravated robbery” usually involves weapons like knives, bats or clubs rather than firearms.
But South Africa, with porous borders and in a war-torn region awash with illegal firearms like AK47s simply doesn’t have this option.
Make guns illegal and you’ll end up with only illegals having guns and the law-abiding majority of the citizenry cowering, unarmed and helpless, in abject fear.
Imagine a bank-robber walks into a bank, close the door behind him and screams, ‘this is a stick-upp, nobody moves!!!” and sixty bank-clients turn around, weapons raised and cocked and pointed to the robber. Or imagine if a housebreaker runs into a cocked fire-arm in every room in your house. Let them be shot like the dogs they are, they have no right to prey on the defenceless.
Why don’t we do it then, you may ask? Simple, those who could defend themselves were threatened with jail and life-sentences for defending their own, and the rest were co-erced to get rid of their weapons. I say give everyone a weapon and the opportunity to defend himself and his loved ones. Have the police failed us, no, we failed ourselves by allowing this communist government to unleash this develish situation on us.
It is very easy to be critical of the police but individuals such as Dries van Tonder show us that there are committed policemen and -women out there.
However, the proof is in the pudding and if you can think along these lines “Thats ok if my cell phone was stolen, the police will get the guy who did it” then you won’t take the law into your own hands. You also probably don’t live in South Africa.
The issue is really that crime is like business – there are different levels of power. And if you remove all the people that are on the street doing crime then the top levels will just appoint more.
The only police department to focus on the higher level criminals (in my opinion) is the Scorpions. The ANC have promised the nation that they will replace it with something even better – the only way we can ever “win the war on crime” is if this “the-scorpions-only-better” department make inroads in arresting and stopping the “management” of the criminal enterprises.
Otherwise we will just keep arresting people who are the “workers” of crime and not the management. The end result will be full jails and crime will still be rampant.
Baranov… there’s no such thing as “the proof is in the pudding”. It makes no sense, does it?
The expression goes: “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”.
In other words, a pudding may well LOOK delicious and luscious, but until it is actually tasted by EATING it, that pudding’s actual proper value is not yet proven.
“The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
Not “the proof is in the pudding”.
Yeah.
I used to live in fourways and one of our neighbours had the habit of taking out his firearms and letting off a few rounds in the garden “Just to let the criminals know I’m armed”.
Didn’t take long before he was burgled and his firearms stolen.
The Police should take a look at mxit and the internet, children can buy guns straight from it, example, I have found a satanic organization that works through mxit, recruiting teenagers with the wrong mind set. These people sell weapons, not just pistols, but up to semi-automatics.
In my opinion the police are to lazy to think of a system to monitor these sites. I see more and more teenagers with guns by the day. Let’s work together let our voices be heard and help stop this. Ever watched V for Vendetta, why can’t we take on the government, where larger in majority.