Taxing law-abiding citizens will not disarm criminals

This is DA MP Ian Cameron’s response to an opinion piece by Dean Peacock and Claire Taylor. Daily Maverick sent their piece to Cameron before publication, and he agreed to respond. You can read the Peacock-Taylor opinion piece here.

Dean Peacock and Claire Taylor ask, with an air of moral certainty, “If alcohol and guns fuel violence, why aren’t we taxing them properly?” It is a seductive question because it sounds bold, decisive and suggests seriousness in a country that often lacks the necessary seriousness when it comes to actual solutions.

But, sadly, it is also analytically flawed and, practically speaking, doomed to fail when it comes to real community safety strategies.

Let us begin with what they get right.

South Africa has a violence crisis. Women are too often killed by intimate partners. Young men are too often shot in taverns and at taxi ranks. Children are horrifically caught in crossfire. South Africans experience crime not as policy debates or quarterly crime stats, but as their daily realities.

But identifying a crisis is not the same as diagnosing it correctly. And when you misdiagnose, you prescribe the wrong medicine and potentially end up worsening the situation.

The category error: Firearms are not alcohol

Peacock and Taylor assert that alcohol and firearms are “commercial determinants of health” and therefore the state should tax them more aggressively to align price with social cost, which is a very neat and technocratic proposal that sounds as if someone has finally discovered the bureaucratic lever that will save us.

But as with many policy proposals it collapses under scrutiny, because firearms and alcohol are fundamentally different goods.

Alcohol has no legitimate defensive purpose. It is a consumable whose excess consumption is itself the harm. Firearms, by contrast, serve extensive lawful and socially vital roles such as security of person and property (a constitutional right), agricultural pest and predator control, conservation management and competitive sport. The lawful use of firearms is not incidental to South African life, it is, in many contexts, indispensable to it.

Imposing “sin taxes” on a vice makes conceptual sense. Imposing the same framework on a tool that protects farmers, guards schools and enables lawful self-defence does not. This is not a minor analytical imprecision. It is a category error that renders their entire fiscal argument incoherent.

The illicit market blindspot

Furthermore, Peacock and Taylor’s taxation argument rests on an assumption so large that it swallows the entire proposal, namely that the people causing harm are buying their weapons and ammunition through legal channels.

They are not.

Credible estimates suggest that roughly three million firearms may be in illicit circulation in South Africa, smuggled, trafficked or diverted through corruption. The overwhelming bulk of weapons circulating in gang networks are unlicensed. They are not bought at registered and lawful dealers. They do not attract excise duties and therefore have no potential for taxation in the first place. They do not care about Treasury’s tax schedule.

Then there is the deeply inconvenient matter of state armouries. Thousands of SAPS firearms have historically leaked into criminal hands through theft, negligence and corruption within law enforcement itself. The state is not merely failing to contain the illicit market, in important respects it has been supplying it.

When the state cannot safeguard its own weapons stockpiles, the proposal to tax licensed civilians is not reform. It is deflection.

The age-old taxation argument is that by raising prices you reduce access and consequently harm is reduced. But criminals do not buy ammunition at licensed dealers, 200 bullets at a time, and politely absorb excise increases. Raising taxes burdens the compliant citizen, the farmer, the small business owner, the woman who has survived threats and now chooses lawful self-defence. It does not burden the syndicate supplied through illegal channels.

Diversion from legal ownership does occur and should be addressed through enforcement and secure storage standards. But scale matters. South Africa is widely estimated to have several million firearms already circulating in illicit markets. Even using publicly reported figures for lost or stolen licensed firearms, and ignoring recovery rates entirely, annual diversion represents only a small fraction of 1% of the existing illicit pool. This does not support the claim that lawful civilian ownership is a primary driver of criminal armament. It suggests instead that the illicit market is sustained overwhelmingly by trafficking, corruption and long-standing illegal circulation.

Policy responses should be proportionate to the dominant source of criminal supply, not the most visible lawful one.

A policy that punishes the poor

And then there is the regressive and anti-poor character of Peacock and Taylor’s proposal. A classic case of a luxury belief where they do not have to carry the cost of their proposal.

South Africa’s national minimum wage ranges roughly between R6,000 and R12,000 per month. An entry-level licensed firearm, before any of the mandatory training, competency certification, safe storage requirements or administrative costs, already costs upwards of R8,000. For the majority of South Africans, lawful firearm ownership is already financially out of reach.

If the stated goal is to reduce access to firearms, the first people priced out of legal ownership are not gangsters. They are the rural smallholders who cannot reach a police station in under two hours. The spaza shop owners in high-crime neighbourhoods. The woman in an abusive household who finally decides she will not be a victim. The very people most exposed to violence and least protected by the state.

Making lawful self-defence the preserve of the wealthy is not a violence-prevention strategy. It is a class policy dressed in public health language.

The tobacco analogy does not hold

Peacock and Taylor lean heavily on the tobacco precedent by citing research from the University of Cape Town’s Research Unit on the Economics of Excisable Products to argue that aggressive above-inflation excise increases reduced smoking without driving illicit trade. That claim depends heavily on a narrow historical period and does not reflect South Africa’s current enforcement reality. Most importantly no person ever relied on their box of cigarettes to protect their belongings and property.

More recent analyses, including work involving researchers from the same policy field, estimate that illicit cigarettes have come to constitute a substantial share of the market in recent years, illustrating how quickly tax differentials can be exploited when regulatory capacity weakens. Excise policy does not operate in a vacuum: its outcomes depend on state enforcement capability. Where enforcement falters, higher taxes risk expanding illicit markets rather than reducing harm.

But even if the tobacco analogy were stronger, it would still fail at the point that matters most. Tobacco is a consumable vice whose harm arises from use itself. Firearms are regulated tools serving legitimate defensive, agricultural, conservation and sporting purposes. Reducing tobacco consumption is inherently the policy objective; reducing lawful access to defensive tools in a high-crime environment is a fundamentally different proposition.

Policy analogies matter because they determine where governments direct pressure. Firearms are different. Reducing lawful civilian ownership does not meaningfully reduce the pool of weapons available to criminals, which is sustained primarily through illicit trafficking, corruption and long-standing illegal circulation rather than licensed retail channels. What such policies change is who retains access to lawful means of protection. The practical effect is not the disarmament of criminal networks, but the removal of defensive capacity from citizens who must often navigate violent environments without a reliable or immediate state security response, while illicit supply remains largely untouched.

What the evidence actually shows

Peacock and Taylor cite South African Medical Research Council research linking strengthened implementation of the Firearms Control Act (FCA) in the 2000s to declines in firearm homicide. That research forms part of an ongoing policy debate. However, additional analysis commissioned by the Civilian Secretariat for Police Service and conducted by the Wits School of Governance examined the same period through a governance and enforcement lens and reached a different emphasis.

It is sometimes suggested that commissioned governance research should be discounted because it is not peer reviewed. That misunderstands how public policy is evaluated. Government research commissioned to inform legislation or administrative reform carries no requirement of academic journal peer review; it is assessed on methodological transparency and consistency with observable institutional outcomes. Across South Africa’s crime data, the pattern identified in the analysis shows improvements in policing capacity coincided with falling homicide rates, while deterioration in enforcement capacity coincided with their return, despite the legislative framework remaining largely unchanged.

After examining the available data, the study concluded that “there is little evidence that the FCA has caused the decline” in violent crime during the period in question, and that the Act was not sufficient to reduce violence in the absence of effective policing. In other words, while legislation formed part of the regulatory environment, enforcement capacity appeared to be the decisive variable.

That finding should have prompted a sustained national focus on crime intelligence, prosecution-led investigations, forensic capacity and border control – the institutional foundations of violence reduction. Instead, we are offered taxation.

They also cite the Covid alcohol restrictions as proof of concept. It is true that trauma admissions fell sharply during lockdown periods when alcohol sales were restricted. But those same periods involved curfews, movement restrictions, heavy security deployments and the effective suspension of normal social life. Isolating alcohol as the singular causal lever is analytically convenient, and analytically insufficient. The moment restrictions lifted, violence rebounded. There was no durable behavioural change, only temporary suppression.

The real problem they decline to name

Peacock and Taylor describe alcohol and guns as “accelerants”. But objects do not decide to commit violence. Human beings do. Violence in South Africa is rooted in organised criminal networks, weak policing, collapsed crime intelligence, forensic backlogs and chronically low conviction rates. Extortion rackets and taxi mafias are not dismantled by excise duties.

They further argue that firearm ownership is merely a statutory privilege rather than a constitutional right. That formulation reflects a narrow reading of Constitutional Court jurisprudence and does not capture the full constitutional picture. While the Constitution contains no explicit right to bear arms, it does guarantee the rights to life, dignity, property and security of the person, rights that necessarily include the ability of individuals to take reasonable steps to defend themselves where the state cannot provide immediate protection. The constitutional question is therefore not whether firearms are explicitly mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but whether regulation that materially limits lawful self-defence remains proportionate to the state’s obligation to safeguard those underlying rights.

Statistics describe trends, but policy ultimately affects real people.

I have walked the streets of Mitchells Plain with neighbourhood watches operating in communities where illicit firearms circulate freely and residents are often left to fend for themselves. I have stood in Atlantis after taxi violence left children injured and one child dead. In those communities, the problem is not that licensed firearm owners can afford ammunition. The problem is organised gangs armed with illegal weapons operating with impunity in the gaps of a state that too often fails to deliver consistent security.

And on a personal note, because this debate is not theoretical for everyone, I am grateful for the day my colleagues and I survived an attack because we were lawfully armed and well trained through regular practice. We sat around the dinner table with our families that night, slightly hurt but alive. That is not ideology. It is lived reality.

What should actually be done

There is no shortage of evidence-based interventions that would genuinely reduce violence in South Africa: rebuilding crime intelligence capacity, improving detection and conviction rates, strengthening forensic pathology services, controlling cross-border weapons trafficking, securing state armouries and properly resourcing the community policing structures that are currently doing the state’s work for free.

None of these requires taxing the farmer who legally protects his livestock, or pricing self-defence out of reach of the woman who cannot wait 24 hours for a police response.

There is something faintly surreal about a proposal that responds to state failure with a levy on compliance. When governance falters, when enforcement fails, when communities bleed, the answer is not to make law-abiding citizenship more expensive. The answer is to make the state functional.

Taxing the compliant may be administratively easy. It may feel morally satisfying in a seminar room.

But not in Mitchells Plain. In Atlantis. In the homes of families who cannot rely on a 24-hour police response.

Effective violence prevention requires policies proportionate to the real sources of harm, not the most visible lawful activities.

It does not disarm criminals, but citizens with legitimate needs. It is not violence prevention. It is policy theatre. DM

Ian Cameron is a member of the National Assembly for the DA and serves as chairperson of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police. In this role he oversees accountability and performance within South Africa’s policing institutions.