Research from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime estimates that around 3.8 million unregistered firearms circulate in South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. South Africa’s violent crime crisis is being fuelled by a hidden market in illegal firearms. This is a trade driven not by foreign smuggling but by guns lost, stolen or diverted from within the country’s own legal stockpiles.
At the end of last year, a Parliamentary reply unearthed that, over the past five years, more than 3,400 police service firearms have been lost or stolen, with only 559 recovered. The rest have vanished into criminal networks, where they fuel murder, armed robbery, gang violence and cash-in-transit heists. In a Democratic Alliance statement, the party said that only 559 have been recovered, meaning the vast majority remain in criminal hands.
Police in the Western Cape uncovered that criminals exploit online marketplaces and covert couriers to conceal transactions and move firearms. “Many of these guns are now being used to commit violent crimes, including robbery, assault, and murder,” the DA said. For ordinary South Africans, this means that the weapons killing them often originate from police armouries, licensed civilian owners, and a firearms registry so dysfunctional that thousands of weapons simply vanish without accountability.
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The consequences extend far beyond individual crimes. Illegal firearms underpin organised violence, enable gender-based attacks, and drive a lethal economy that costs lives daily. Over the past five years, the South African Police Service (SAPS) confiscated 21,702 illegal firearms, with 6,853 linked to murder cases, according to official SAPS data.
GroundUp calculated that firearms are involved in more than 40% of murders nationally, with provinces like the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and Gauteng seeing the highest confiscation rates and highest gun crime. According to the SAPS, the Western Cape recorded the highest number of seizures of illegal guns, followed by KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.
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