THE Firearms Act will be tightened to introduce training and psychological tests before licences are issued, impose age restrictions, make sure all firearms are profiled so owners can be traced, and increase penalties for offences, Government has said.
In that regard, Cabinet has approved the principles to amend and strengthen the Firearms Act, modernising the 1957 legislation and upgrading the registration and licensing of firearms, and setting up a firearms database and registry.
Speaking after yesterday's Cabinet meeting, the Minister of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services, Dr Jenfan Muswere, said the Amendment Bill will make provision for the classification of firearms certificates to differentiate those issued to individuals and juristic persons.
"The amendments will also seek, among other things, to introduce psychological and training tests before one is issued with a firearm certificate and place an age restriction on the possession of firearms," he said.
The amendment will also regulate the number of firearms an individual can own while providing for the profiling of all firearms for purposes of easy identification and tracing. It will also specify the penalties for firearm offences, including the failure to properly secure firearms.
Addressing questions during the briefing, Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage Minister Kazembe Kazembe said the Firearms Act had been in existence since 1957 and a lot had changed since then. This had necessitated the amendment of the law.
"It is not consistent with the current trends. Some of the terms in that Act are not consistent with what is obtaining at the moment and some new firearms are not defined in the old Act. There are also a lot of gaps that we've identified," Minister Kazembe said.
He said Zimbabwe is a signatory to a number of international protocols and conventions, hence the law needed to be aligned to those conventions. Under the current Law, a 16-year-old is allowed a to possess a gun, a situation which Government is seeking to change.
"We believe a 16-year-old is not mature enough to be in possession of a gun so we need to up that age to a certain acceptable age. We are thinking of 21 years," Minister Kazembe said.
He added that the tenure of the firearm license was also under scrutiny as the current Act stipulated three years without revisits in between.
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Minister Kazembe said this would be revisited to ensure that circumstances under which someone received the license were still valid.
"For starters, probably you are not the same person mentally, but you still hold on to that gun or maybe when you were given the gun, you had a lot of businesses and you had to protect yourself, but maybe you have been liquidated. We also we have realised that there was no limit to the number of guns one can have for using one license. When you're getting a license, we need to be sure what you're getting that license for. And we need to then continuously check if you are using that gun for that license for which you applied," he said.
The new Act will have different categories for licenses while also using new technologies to manage or profile the firearms and ammunition, among other things.
The holder of the license will also be tested to ensure psychological and mental fitness to own the firearm.
"We are doing all of this to try and make sure that only those who deserve to have firearms are given licenses. At the moment, everyone may have access to a license. And this may have resulted in so many guns that we have lying around. So we need to deal with that issue. We need to make sure that only those who deserve to have firearms licenses have firearms licenses," said Minister Kazembe.
