A Matter of Life and Death

The armed thug shooting one of the teachers and taking a fellow pupil hostage on the morning of 10 February 2005 must have traumatised learners at Montevideo Primary.

This incident proves that proclaiming firearm-free zones at schools will not prohibit homicidal maniacs from entering these premises. In fact, expecting such an individual to honour a law prohibiting firearms is sheer utopian fantasy.

In Europe, 16 people were killed in a public school shooting in Germany in April 2002.

In the US, thugs using firearms at elementary or secondary schools between 1997 and 2002 killed 32 students. The total includes gang fights, robberies, accidents and the so-called: “school shootings.” All these attacks took place in firearm-free zones.

In Israel, however, teachers and parents serving as school aids are armed at all times on school grounds, with semi-automatic weapons. Since this policy was adopted in the 1970’s, attacks by gunmen at schools in Israel have ceased.

Firearms make it easier to kill people, but firearms also make it easier for citizens to defend the innocent.

With lives lost in Germany and the United States of America in schools which are firearm-free zones, and no attacks by armed gunmen in Israel since teachers and parents serving as school aids have been armed, why would the issue of declaring educational facilities firearm-free zones, even be considered in South Africa?

History and common sense prove that firearm-free zones are dangerous.

Every now and again one meets somebody in life that sobers up your thinking on certain issues. One such person was a young man from Burundi who thinks he may be around 18 or 19 years old, we will call him David.

I met David at the Summit Youth Leadership and Worldview Training Course, which took place at Rocklands in Simonstown, Cape Town. At the age of seven David one day came home after being out and on his return found blood outside the front door of his home. He went inside thinking that they had slaughtered a chicken for the evening meal. On entry he found his mother lying on the floor gasping for breath, her throat had been slit and a breast cut off. She had been an unarmed lady at home when attacked by gangsters / terrorists in the Burundi countryside.

Having seen his mother in this state young David fled to Zaire. When I asked him how he knew where to go or how he managed to move to another country at such a young age, he said that all he did was follow the crowd. On entering Zaire he went to a United Nations refugee camp where he found his 4-year-old brother who had also fled with the crowds.

After having been in this refugee camp for a while it was attacked by terrorists, and there David witnessed his 4 year old brother slaughtered. Once again an innocent group of refugees unarmed and unable to defend themselves were vulnerable to the thugs. At this attack David was captured and taken by the attackers to a camp where he was trained to take medical supplies to the soldiers in the frontline of a war zone. He then had to bring injured soldiers back from the field.

On trying to escape from the camp on two occasions, he was caught and returned to the camp. The third time he tried to escape and was caught, a knife-wielding soldier slit David’s mouth open on the side. He still has the scar today. David explains how the camp was situated.

He said there were three sides to the camp, it was triangularly shaped and on two sides there were armed guards holding them captive. On the third side was just a large forest. No guards were stationed on the third side because they knew that if you went into the forest you would never come out alive again.

One day David and twenty others decided to escape into the forest. He suggests that he was probably in the forest for a period of about three years. During this period 19 of the young men were left behind due to dysentery and malaria, these never came out of the forest again. David and a young friend eventually came out of the forest and on coming out these two young, unarmed men were attacked by terrorists, David’s friend was shot in the leg. To this day his one leg is now shorter than the other.

David eventually landed up in Tanzania as a refugee. He has lost contact with his seven brothers and sisters one of whom was wheel chair bound. After a couple of years he ended up as a refugee in South Africa. He is trying to get some formal education and has been accepted with a bursary into a Christian school near Cape Town.

His story of being beaten up by gangsters in Cape Town and the little he had being stolen whilst living under a bridge in Cape Town is unbelievable.

This kind of gangsterism and terrorism can only happen in a society that is unarmed. It is only in places where there has been total disarmament that thugs can terrorise, injure and maim so many innocent people, without anyone being able to defend themselves. If both parties were armed, a war would ensue, but it is always when certain sectors of the community have been disarmed, that the armed thugs can control and manipulate the area for their own ends. This is exactly when one finds genocide and mass murders taking place.

It is exactly for this reason that we in South Africa need to take a stand against the tyrannical Firearms Control Act, which is in its entirety aimed at disarming law-abiding citizens and is a threat, not only to the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people in our country, but a threat to the lives of all South Africans. We must fight this Act personally in our families, in our churches and at civil government level. We must never surrender our arms.

Charl van Wyk