Legal firearms save lives. We refuse to be disarmed.
Home invasions. Hijackings. Farm attacks. Armed robbery. SAPS takes hours to respond, if they respond at all. Government’s answer is to remove self-defence as a valid reason to own a firearm. We refuse.
Sign The Petition NowThe State Cannot Protect You
South Africa is one of the most violent countries in the world. The police service meant to protect you is understaffed, under-trained, and under-resourced. When you call 10111, the clock starts. And it does not start in your favour.
The average SAPS response time in a live emergency is measured in hours. In many areas it is measured in whether they respond at all. Stations stand empty. Vehicles are out of service. Case dockets disappear. The Criminal Record Centre sits on a backlog that means violent offenders walk out on bail because there is no record to produce.
Into that reality, government now proposes to remove self-defence as a valid reason to own a firearm. A right recognised under South African common law for centuries. A right upheld by courts. A right that stands between many families and being another statistic.
A disarmed, law-abiding citizen in a country with more than three million illegal firearms is not safer. They are a softer target.
What The Firearms Amendment Bill Does
The Bill is marketed as firearm regulation. In practice it is firearm removal. Specifically:
- Removes self-defence as a valid reason for a new firearm licence
- Forces renewal applicants to re-justify ownership without self-defence grounds
- Shortens licence validity periods — creating repeated administrative attrition
- Restricts firearm transportation and storage rights for licensed owners
- Expands SAPS discretionary refusal powers with limited appeal
- Imposes liability for ammunition quantities held, even for legitimate training
Every one of these provisions punishes the law-abiding firearm owner. None of them reaches the criminal.
The state does not respond. The criminal does not register. The law-abiding citizen pays the price.
Sign The PetitionArmed Protection For Them. Disarmament For You.
Cabinet ministers move with heavily armed VIP protection units. The Presidency maintains a dedicated close-protection detail. Senior officials travel in convoys with weapons that ordinary citizens cannot legally possess.
None of them argues that armed protection is unnecessary. None of them accepts that police response is adequate for their own safety. The state budget reflects the same truth: over R1 billion a year is spent on VIP Protection Services. Every rand of it is a silent admission that the state cannot guarantee safety through normal policing.
Then the same government turns to the public and says: you do not need this. You should not have this. Trust us. Trust SAPS. Trust the system.
The same system they do not trust with their own lives.
What We Are Demanding
Three concrete reforms:
Preserve self-defence as a valid licensing reason
The Firearms Amendment Bill must be amended to retain self-defence explicitly under Section 13 of the Firearms Control Act. This is not a policy preference. It is a recognition of lived reality in a country where state protection is not reliably available.
Reform bail and the Criminal Record Centre
Bail decisions are being made without criminal records because SAPS cannot produce them. Violent offenders walk. Invest in the CRC and demand accountability for the docket backlog that is putting criminals back on the street.
Enforce existing laws before writing new ones
South Africa has one of the strictest firearm control frameworks in the world. The problem is not the law. The problem is enforcement against illegal firearms — of which there are millions in circulation, many leaked from state stockpiles.
This Is Not An Abstract Debate
This affects the farmer whose nearest police station is forty kilometres away. The single mother in a suburban home after dark. The shopkeeper whose business has been hit three times. The family that drives home along an unlit road. The pensioner alone at night.
It affects communities in rural areas that have organised their own protection because no one is coming. It affects small business owners who employ licensed security because SAPS will not arrive in time. It affects people who have already lost someone to violent crime and who refuse to lose another.
This Bill tells every one of them: we know the state is failing you. We know the criminals will remain armed. And we are still going to take your means of defence away.
When the state cannot guarantee your safety and the criminal will not be disarmed, the law-abiding citizen must retain the means to protect their life.
Why Your Name Matters
The Bill is moving through Parliament. Public comment has been opened and closed. Committee deliberations continue. What determines whether this Bill passes in its current form is not moral argument. It is pressure.
Every name registered here is added to a formal parliamentary submission to the Portfolio Committee on Police. Every signature is counted. Every signature says the same thing: this Bill does not reflect my position as a law-abiding citizen of this country.
Thousands of silent objections do not make a record. Thousands of signed objections do.
Your name, email address, and province go into a parliamentary submission. Nothing else. No resale. No spam. No third-party sharing.
Your signature tells Parliament:
Self-defence is not a privilege. It is a right. I refuse to be disarmed.
The more names behind this submission, the harder it becomes to ignore.
Section 11 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa guarantees the right to life. Section 12(1)(c) guarantees the right to be free from all forms of violence, whether from public or private sources.
Self-defence is the practical exercise of those rights. Where the state demonstrably cannot prevent private violence — and the official crime statistics confirm this beyond reasonable dispute — the removal of practical means of self-defence is an interference with constitutional rights that demands strict justification.
The current Bill offers no such justification. It does not demonstrate that legal, licensed firearm ownership meaningfully contributes to the violent crime problem. It does not engage with the reality that the vast majority of firearms used in violent crime are unlicensed. It does not answer why the law-abiding citizen must bear the cost of failed enforcement against the illegal market.
That failure of justification is legally cognisable. It can be challenged in the Constitutional Court. But litigation succeeds where the record demonstrates broad public interest and widespread impact. That record is built here, with every name added below.
The state failed. The criminals remained armed. Now they want to disarm you.
Civil Society South Africa will submit every signature to Parliament. We will challenge this Bill on constitutional grounds if it passes. We will not accept a policy that punishes the law-abiding and empowers the criminal.
Add your name. Make the record impossible to ignore.
Self-defence is not optional. Neither is speaking up.
Sign Now