Rather, countries passed big packages of gun laws, which overhauled the nation’s firearm code fairly broadly, which all tended to share similar features. According to Santaella-Tenorio, they generally included:
Banning “weapons that are actually very powerful,” like automatic weapons.
“They all implemented background checks.”
“They all required permits and licenses for purchasing guns.”
South Africa’s comprehensive Firearm Control Act, passed in 2000, contained all these measures. One study found that firearm homicides in five major South African cities decreased by 13.6 percent per year for the next five years. “Reductions in nonfirearm homicides were also observed,” Santaella-Tenorio et al. note, “although not as pronounced as the ones observed for firearm homicides.”
Source: A huge international study of gun control finds strong evidence that it actually works – Vox
- The homicide rate in South Africa did not begin to go down in 2000 but in 1995. And The rates have been going up again since 2012.
- If Gun Control is your objective, something weird happened in South Africa: “As Masuku points out, the graph below shows that “murder decreased by 18% in the past seven years and by 2% in the past 12 months” (p.19. FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE: South African crime trends in 2002). This decrease needs to be considered critically. Masuku points out that “it is unusual for murder rates to decline while other forms of violent crime are increasing, and this trend is particularly striking because the percentage of murders committed with a firearm has increased.”
- While it is true the South Africa’s murder rate halved between 1994 and 2014, the same thing happened with the US during the same period but with a much higher percentage of guns on private hands and overall liberalization of gun laws across the nation.
Sorry Skippy. Your study just won’t wash. Do you know what reduces violent crime? Going after violent offenders. My guns are behaving quite well and you do not need to go after them.
Mind your own business, thank you.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a gun control advocate bring up South Africa, given that they have five times our murder rate. They’re really scraping.
Will they never learn,their statistics they do are bias and don’t hold water.They can do what they will with law abiding citizens and guns,it will do nothing for the problem with criminals.It just doesn’t work that way,in every case the other crimes always increase, trade off don’t make things better.