Police are searching for suspected gang members who killed 15 people at a tavern near Johannesburg, the country’s commercial capital, using a handgun and 9mm pistols on Saturday night. The attack in Soweto’s Nomzamo township came amid a wave of armed violence. At least seven other people were killed in similar attacks elsewhere in South Africa over the weekend. Adèle Kirsten, director of Gun Free South Africa, said she hoped the violence would be a turning point. “We should be horrified, outraged. Twenty-three people are shot and killed every day in South Africa and it goes unnoticed. This is wrong and this should draw attention to how many people are dying,” he said. Four people were killed and eight wounded in a shooting at a tavern on the outskirts of the southeastern city of Pietermaritzburg on Saturday night. The local mayor, Mzimkhulu Thebolla, said the attack ended very quickly without any robbery, conversation or fighting. “Every week we get news of people who have been randomly shot,” he said. South Africa has long been plagued by extremely high levels of violent crime, one of the many legacies of decades of rule by the repressive, racist apartheid regime. Gun murders have been rising year after year for a decade. National gun crime rates around the world Once, most deaths were the result of personal disputes between individuals, experts say, but now a growing percentage of killings are the work of groups, including vigilantes, politically motivated criminal networks and organized gangs. The military-grade weapons used in the Soweto attack strongly suggest that organized criminals are involved, as other people do not have the connections to acquire such weapons. About a third of violent crimes recorded each month involve firearms. Between April 2021 and the end of June 2021, 5,760 homicides were committed in South Africa, one of the highest per capita rates in the world. Gareth Newham, a crime and security expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, said organized criminals in South Africa were becoming more violent. “This requires a significant political response. Effective intelligence is essential,” he said. “There’s only a certain amount of people who do this, so it should be possible to proactively remove guns from society… But the police don’t even seem to know what the problem is.” Cyril Ramaphosa, the South African president, called on Sunday for a joint government and community effort to tackle the problem. The continued inability of South Africa’s police force to enforce the rule of law in parts of the country has drawn fierce criticism from opponents and some allies of the ruling African National Congress, which has been in power since the end of the apartheid regime in 1994. Many say gun crime is part of much wider governance and rule of law problems in South Africa that suffered during the nine-year rule of Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma. But a major union confederation allied to the ANC issued a statement on Monday saying the “horrific” attack in Soweto was a consequence of “a moral degeneration in society that requires urgent intervention by the forces, society at large, [and] churches.” The shootings have revived a heated debate over gun law reform in South Africa. An effort to end the right to own a gun for self-defense met stiff resistance when it was debated last year. Opponents argued that the high level of violent crime meant “denying people the right to defend themselves is tantamount to denying the right to life, safety and psychological and physical integrity” and called for better policing. Kirsten said there was no evidence to support such claims and that the new laws would help reduce the number of guns available to criminals, making everyone safer. “All the clauses in the bill would help reduce deadly gun violence … but the government seems to be dragging its feet,” he said. Writing for News24, a local media platform, a commentator, Adrian Basson, supported the call for better gun control. “How many innocent people have to be cut before we consider much stricter gun control laws in South Africa?” asked. The biggest source of illegal guns in South Africa is theft from legal owners. Assault rifles are rare, often coming from caches left over from the conflicts that ravaged southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, or stolen from military stores in the region. There are thought to be 3.8 million unregistered illegal firearms in circulation in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
