In 1997 Sydney Mufamadi in answers to questions stated in Parliament that the amount of violent crime committed by licensed firearm owners was “insignificant”.  This is estimated to be 0.05%. 

Registering the 99.95% of firearms in the hope of finding the 0.05% is like registering each straw in a haystack to find the needle. 

First, universal firearms registration would be ineffective because it cannot reduce firearms deaths, cannot help police to solve crimes, nor can it let police know who has what firearms.  There is no factual support for the claim that firearms registration can help the police solve crimes.

v      The police in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have worked with firearms registration for a number of years, but in none of these countries have the police found full firearms registration to be cost-effective.
v      A secret police report from the United Kingdom admits that their extensive firearms database has not been useful in solving crimes in that country.
v      The police in two Australian states recommended the termination of universal firearms registration. Report of the Victoria Police on the Firearms Registration System, February 26, 1987; Report of the South Australian Deregulation Task Force, Adelaide, October, 1985. 
v      The New Zealand government decided to discontinue firearms registration in 1983 after the New Zealand National Police recommended its termination since they had not found it useful.  Despite drastic increases in funding in the 1970s, the New Zealand National Police were actually falling further and further behind.  They discovered that after several decades, their firearm registry hadn't proved useful in solving crimes and it was diverting scarce resources away from more important duties.
v      Canada’s recently elected new Government has decided to abandon the firearms registry.  It had been demonstrated that the Canadian licensing and registration system was not cost-effective and had not reduced crime.  Research had shown that 71 per cent of firearm licenses were found to have errors, and over 250,000 guns were registered with the same serial numbers as stolen guns.  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had said that they had no faith in the registry’s information, which listed barely more than half the country’s guns or gun owners.  Moreover, the firearms register had not saved any lives: while gun homicide numbers were indeed down, the proportion of domestic homicides involving guns had not declined.  Nor had the overall homicide rate declined, stressing that the actual increase in homicides suggested that crime rates were driven by sociological factors, such as the percentage of youth in a total population, and social conditions, rather than the availability of one method of murder. No evidence had been found that blanket gun regulations, even firearms prohibitions, contributed to the reduction of criminal violence.
v      Switzerland had joined Canada, New Zealand and Brazil in rejecting measures such as the mandatory registration of longarms, based on the growing awareness that such approaches were not cost-effective and did not reduce crime.

Every country that has studied registration of firearms has come to the same conclusion.  It is an utter waste of time, resources and money with no benefit to the police or society.  That the South African police have not reached the same conclusion is evidence of a willingness to serve political agendas rather than the desperate needs of society.  This amounts to nothing less than the SAPS and government being willing to sacrifice the lives of citizens to achieve political objectives.

The value return of the Canadian register upon which our even more complex and bureaucratic system is based is calculated to be $150.00 for every $1 million spent.  The Canadian handgun register has in more than 64 years of operation not solved a single case.   New Zealand dropped the registration of long guns for exactly the same reason and continues to maintain a handgun register for political reasons only.  Two studies in Australia by the police, which came to the same conclusion, were ignored for political reasons.  A similar study in England by the police was also ignored.  There is absolutely no doubt that the SA firearms register is no different and is a politically motivated waste of valuable police resources and scarce manpower.  That the police have not reported this failing is ample evidence to the public the police are not doing their duty and are in breech of the public trust placed in them.

Costing billions of Rands and more importantly the lives of citizens, thousands of police members are tied up daily in chasing guns and recording useless data that never can and will not solve one single crime.  Nor will this data ever offer any useful police intelligence that could not be obtained in a far more efficient and less costly manner.  Criminals do not license firearms and thus far have not been as stupid as government will have the public believe to leave licensed firearms traceable back to themselves at crime scenes as the only source of intelligence.