Thursday, August 18, 2011

This is what happens...

...when you let the kind of people who worry about shoulder things that go up to write firearms law:
So I bought the book a few months ago, from Parow Arms & Ammo. Completed the open book exam, made an appointment, was handed a closed book exam asking the easy half of the questions from the open book exam, exchanged that for a competency certificate they had printed the week before, and then had to put ten shots into an A5 paper target at 10m with a Norinco LM4 (I think).

I’ve heard that one can fail the competency but if you do you should probably have someone help you with the shoelaces thing in the morning as well.
The above quote is from a post in which Wouter is describing his travails in getting rubber-stamped to buy a semiauto rifle in South Africa.

It's a pretty fine kettle of fish gun owners seem to have found themselves in down there: The Great Big Firearms Law they passed was apparently as convoluted as a bucket of earthworms and has only gotten more Through-The-Looking-Glass with successive attempts to "fix" it.

3 comments:

BobG said...

When the government "fixes" things, it's always something like when you get your tomcat "fixed".

Mikael said...

Much more lenient than the swedish system(very similar, but our competency stuff is STRICT, with stuff like hit 45 points in 5 shots at 25 meters one-handed in under 6 minutes, repeated 3 times, and hit the paper with all shots, one-handed, at 25 meters in under 17 seconds, 3 times). That's ONE of the requirements for a pistol licence, oh and you have to renew that requirement every 2 years.

Rifle stuff is less strict, assuming you have a hunting licence(I think the training/competition licence may be about as strict), but the course to become a hunter is quite a hoop to jump as well, and it requires you own/lease land to hand on.

wrm said...

What's worse is that out police refuse to do the same competency, claiming that they have internal training which works better for them.

Most of us are of the opinion that the police might have a 5% pass rate on a good day, and that only if someone has a 9mm pencil to stab some extra holes in the targets.