If alcohol and guns fuel violence, why aren’t we taxing them properly?

This piece was sent to DA MP Ian Cameron before publication with an offer to respond. He agreed, and his piece can be read here.

Stories about violence fill South Africa’s news feeds daily. Women killed by intimate partners. Young men shot in taverns and at taxi ranks. Children caught in the crossfire. Families burying loved ones whose deaths feel both shocking and entirely predictable.

South Africans do not need persuading that we face a crisis of violence. What has often been missing is political clarity and the fiscal support to act.

In his 2026 State of the Nation Address (Sona), President Cyril Ramaphosa provided some ideas about what we can do to prevent violence. He stated plainly that alcohol abuse drives violence, road accidents and crime, and called for limits on liquor outlet density, trading hours and bulk sales. He also committed to strengthening the regulation of firearms and ammunition, recognising gun violence as a national crisis.

This alignment between public health evidence and political leadership matters.

For years, public health researchers and violence-prevention practitioners have described alcohol and guns as a lethal cocktail in South Africa: alcohol increases the likelihood that disputes escalate into violence; firearms increase the likelihood that violence becomes fatal. Where both are easily available, particularly in fragile contexts marked by poverty, inequality and weak law enforcement, the result is not only more violence but more lethal violence, imposing enormous costs on health systems – including trauma, rehabilitation and long-term disability care, social support and forensic pathology services as well as policing and court systems.

One of the most effective violence prevention strategies available to governments is to decrease access to both alcohol and guns.

Research by the South African Medical Research Council has found that strengthened implementation of the Firearms Control Act in the 2000s was associated with significant declines in firearm homicide and femicide, before enforcement weakened and diversion increased. Internationally, decreasing access to a firearm in the home is consistently associated with lowered risk of homicide and suicide – particularly for women in abusive relationships and for men during periods of emotional distress.

During the Covid lockdown, when alcohol sales were restricted, two-thirds of weekly trauma admissions disappeared. Gunshot injuries declined (although the proportion increased). Assaults declined. Gender-based violence (GBV) declined. Emergency wards that had been overwhelmed became manageable. These are the predictable effects of good policy, repeated across countries, from Australia to Colombia, from Scotland to Botswana, among others.

The President’s speech suggests he and his Cabinet understand the promise offered by tighter regulations on alcohol and guns.

The Budget speech by Minister Enoch Godongwana offered an opportunity to align fiscal policy with the clearer violence prevention elements of Ramaphosa’s Sona.

In the lead-up to the Budget speech, civil society organisations called on National Treasury to introduce targeted taxes on alcohol, firearms and ammunition, and other health-harming products, thereby aligning their price with the social cost of injury and death.

This is consistent with the World Health Organization’s “3 by 35” initiative which calls on countries to raise real prices on alcohol, tobacco and sugary drinks by at least 50% by 2035 to save lives and generate vital public revenue. Health taxes cut consumption and mobilise funds for health and social protection.

The 2026 Budget did not include such measures. It does strengthen law enforcement and judicial capacity by increasing spending for both. It also strengthens critical social protection initiatives shown to decrease violence: social grants remain robust and early childhood development funding expands significantly. This is important and welcome.

But violence was not mentioned once. Not violence against women, or children nor the epidemic of violence among men. No dedicated funding stream for GBV prevention or evidence-based child protection programmes implemented by cash-strapped NGOs or firearm injury prevention. While the Budget did increase excise duties on alcohol, this was explicitly in line with inflation. In real terms, this lack of structural shift preserves current affordability rather than reducing it. Maintaining revenue is not the same as reducing harm.

The economic objection to increased taxation on harmful products is predictable: higher taxes fuel illegal markets and threaten jobs and growth. The evidence does not support these claims. Research by the University of Cape Town’s Research Unit on Economics and Excisable Products found that between 1994 and 2009, aggressive above-inflation tobacco tax increases in South Africa did not drive illicit trade – smoking prevalence fell sharply and revenue held. Where illicit markets have grown, the drivers have been enforcement failure and industry conduct, not taxation. In addition, recent modelling from the Sheffield Addictions Research Group shows that when households shift spending away from harmful products, money circulates more intensively within labour-rich parts of the economy, generating greater domestic value and employment. Reducing consumption of harmful commodities thus strengthens economic resilience rather than undermines it.

Some argue that greater civilian gun ownership enhances safety. The evidence says otherwise. A significant proportion of firearms used in violent crime originate from legal stocks: theft, loss, corruption and criminal use of licensed firearms make the boundary between legal and illegal porous. Expanding civilian ownership in fragile systems increases diversion and escalation. This does not indict every lawful owner; it recognises systemic risk. In South Africa, firearm ownership is not a constitutional right but a regulated statutory privilege – and the state is entitled, and obligated, to impose strict licensing and oversight conditions in the interests of public safety.

The same logic applies to alcohol. Clear laws on outlet density, trading hours and bulk sales set the boundaries for enforcement. But even where enforcement is patchy, strong policy saves lives: if heavy episodic drinking is closely associated with assault and intimate partner violence, and affordability and density shape consumption, then the government has an obligation to restrict both to reduce alcohol-related harm.

Yet regulatory reform has stalled. Amendments to strengthen firearm regulation face delay and resistance. Structural alcohol reform, including minimum unit pricing and sustained real-term excise increases, remains unimplemented. Using spurious arguments about economic impact, industry has effectively blocked regulatory reform to secure their profits.

The President named two accelerants of violence: alcohol and guns. Neither are ordinary consumer goods – they are commercial determinants of health, products sold for profit that generate predictable, preventable harm. Both respond to price signals. Both impose public costs that far exceed their tax contribution.

What remains is to use fiscal and regulatory policy more boldly to reduce exposure to harm.

Violence is not inevitable. It is preventable. Prevention requires political will. And political will in speeches must be funded in budgets. DM

Dean Peacock is commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Global Gun Violence and Health, founding co-director of the Global Coalition for WHO Action on Gun Violence and honorary senior lecturer with the UCT Division of Social and Behavioural Science, School of Public Health.

Claire Taylor has worked on gun violence prevention for more than 15 years and currently works for Gun Free South Africa as a research and policy analyst, monitoring violence and injury prevention developments with a particular focus on reducing gun violence in South Africa.