The state has lost 2 523 police firearms in four years, while 41 297 people were murdered with illegal guns. As gun violence increases, civil organisations and firearm stakeholders say now is the time to finally fix the Central Firearms Register.
Guns remain the leading instrument of murders and attempted murders in South Africa.
Firearm-related murders increased from 31% to 44% of all murders between 2020 and 2025, with a recent medical journal editorial calling it “South Africa’s neglected public health emergency” and not just a criminal justice issue.
As the surge of mass shootings continues to escalate, at least 67 people have been killed and injured in three separate events recently. These killings highlight the use of guns like AK-47s and pistols in their brutal violence. The gunmen reportedly even used a home nearby to reload their firearms three times.
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The source of these guns and ammunition is yet to be determined. These questions have brought the dysfunctional Central Firearm Registry (CFR) – which should track every legal gun – back into sharp focus. But since at least 2004, the CFR has been ineffective at providing usable data and riddled with corruption and mismanagement.
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News24 asked Gun Free SA (GFSA), Civil Society SA (CSSA) and a gun dealer – Jaco Brink from Outdoor Investment Holdings – about the dysfunction at the CFR, and how this contributes to the proliferation of the country’s gun violence.
Why is the CFR not fit for purpose?
The core mandate of the CFR is to track every legal gun in the country, but organisations say that for years now, it hasn’t fulfilled its purpose.
As it stands, it functions on an outdated, manual, paper-based system with a fragmented digital database that cannot be reconciled.
Brink says dealers cannot use the system to verify gun licences in real-time either, because it is a manual system. No electronic system for dealers exists, he adds. They have also faced issues with corrupted, outdated, or missing data.
The CSSA states that “rather than enhancing public safety, it systematically penalises law-abiding citizens through excessive delays, lost documentation, arbitrary application refusals, and backlog chaos”.
For how long has it been dysfunctional?
Since at least 2004, the GFSA says.
A database system bought in 2004 “to digitise the registry never worked”, despite it costing the state in excess of R340 million.
In 2010, a task team found irregularities and corruption in firearm licensing, GFSA says, including “licences issued to people who should have been refused them, bribes paid to speed up licences, and prohibited firearms wrongly recorded”.
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The CSSA adds that the dysfunction is “structural and has persisted for more than a decade”.
Since Brink and his company began selling guns in 2008, they’ve dealt with this dysfunction.
Why has it not been fixed?
The organisations News24 spoke to are unsure, since the state has not provided any clear answers.
CSSA says the reasons range from capacity constraints, IT failures and high application volumes. “This can only be seen as an excuse for lack of political will.”
The GFSA says the pattern by the government that perpetuates the CFR dysfunction is usually due to a lack of accountability, no consequences for previous contracts and trying to find new digital systems.
“Buying another computer system will not, by itself, fix the CFR. If inaccurate records, weak controls and opportunities for corruption are simply transferred onto a new platform, we will have digitised the dysfunction rather than solved it.”
Has anything ever been done to fix the CFR?
“Limited, sporadic, quick fixes” are how the organisations describe the state’s response.
CSSA says police sometimes announce teams to address the backlog, which clears a small fraction for a short period before inefficiency takes over again.
GFSA says a new digital contract was awarded in 2023, while the deadline for the system to be in place, as told to Parliament, was March 2026. But “we don’t know if the deadline was ever met”.
Brink says that he was part of industry consultations which took the CFR to court in 2019, and eventually led to an order that police must implement an electronic CFR system. “To date, it has not been implemented,” he adds.
What else has been done to force accountability?
CSSA says “numerous court cases” have been brought against the CFR.
One involved the SA Arms and Ammunition Dealers Association in 2021, where the police were ordered to implement an electronic firearm management system by 2023.
“We still don’t have a modern digital system in place, or any real commitment to the implementation of one,” the CSSA says.
Another is a judgment delivered in February this year called the Marksman Arms judgment, which highlighted, once again, the mismanagement of the registry. CSSA says the court explicitly confirmed that the CFR operated unlawfully by systematically delaying, obstructing, and refusing applications without statutory authority.
“The court explicitly rejected ‘capacity constraints’ as a valid legal defence for failing to fulfil statutory duties.”
What are the core issues that need to be fixed first?
Brink says dealers just want a live, working and up-to-date digital system that can track guns and verify the licenses of those who purchase firearms.
GFSA and CSSA agree that the priority is to move to a fully integrated digital system.
Doing away with the manual, paper-based one is the first priority. Secondly, they want “corruption within the CFR to be addressed and stopped immediately”.
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CSSA also wants licensing officers to stop using “arbitrary criteria not found within the Firearms Control Act” to reject motivations for licenses.
On a policy side, GFSA says traceability is the practical test. “It should be used to identify and close the points at which firearms leak from legal possession into criminal markets. Every firearm should leave an auditable trail.”
What numbers do we have now?
In a recent parliamentary reply, the Acting Police Minister, Firoz Cachalia, said that 2 523 police guns were either stolen or lost between 2022 and April 2026. They included 66 R5 rifles and 12 shotguns.
He added that only 80 persons have been found guilty, while 41 were police members.
In a seperate reply, Cachalia also said that 41 297 people were murdered using unlicensed firearms for the financial years from 2022 to 2026.
According to his reply, during the same period, 393 people were murdered using firearms legally owned by licensed individuals.
He also revealed that only 178 firearms involved in unlicensed firearm murders could be traced back to the police, the army, or the metro police between 2022 and April 2026.
Why is it important to focus on the CFR now?
With mass shootings and violent gun-related crimes on the rise, questions are being asked about where the guns come from.
The GFSA says: “After a shooting, we understandably ask: Who pulled the trigger? We should also ask: Where did the gun come from?”
“Without a working registry, no one can answer,” it adds, saying a gun that disappears from legal controls does not disappear from society.
The CSSA says that “focusing on the CFR exposes the reality that gun violence in South Africa is an enforcement and state corruption issue, not a legal gun ownership issue”.
GFSA adds that if the CFR is being rebuilt, this is the moment to get it right.
Tensions have also escalated over the proposed amendments to the Firearms Control Amendment Bill, with the CSSA demanding that the government, through a Promotion of Access to Information Act application, provide evidence for some of the amendments it has proposed.
