South Africa is reeling from a spate of mass shootings. What’s behind the sudden spike?

By Nimi Princewill, CNN

(CNN) — After five shootings in less than a week left at least 46 people dead, South Africa is wrestling with how to tackle a spike in gun crime that threatens to undo recent progress in reducing its notoriously high murder rate.

Even in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world, the scale of the killings in such a short space of time has provoked shock. Experts blame two things: organized crime and the easy availability of illegal firearms.

“South Africa is awash with guns,” said Julian Rademeyer, adviser to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), which tracks organized crime.

That was laid bare by the bullet casings that lay strewn on the ground after eight gunmen armed with AK-47 rifles and pistols opened fire at a tavern in Wedela, an area west of Johannesburg known for illegal mining, last Saturday night, killing 18 people. Hours after that incident, another 10 people were killed in Lwandle near Cape Town.

“The weapon matters,” according to Stanley Maphosa, executive director of Gun Free South Africa, a nonprofit focused on reducing gun violence. He said the availability of firearms can turn conflicts involving organized crime, extortion, gangs, revenge, taxi violence or personal disputes into attacks that kill many people.

What’s happening with South Africa’s murder rate?

Official police figures show South Africa’s murder rate fell to 41 per 100,000 people in the 12 months to March 31, 2025, compared with 44.7 in the previous year. The decline has continued, with fewer murders recorded between January to March and April to June than in the same periods a year earlier.

Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia has said recent efforts, including targeted police operations and closer cooperation between agencies, may be helping, while cautioning that more study is needed to understand why murders are falling.

What has stood out is the frequency of mass killings, even as murders overall fall. Rademeyer said the attacks themselves are not new, but they appear to be increasing.

The attacks have also left some communities anxious about further violence. Residents near the tavern west of Johannesburg told Reuters they feared more attacks, with some saying they no longer felt safe carrying out ordinary errands.

GI-TOC recorded 45 mass killings between January 1 and September 28 this year, killing at least 210 people and wounding 79 others.

It classifies an incident as a mass killing when at least three people are intentionally killed in a single attack. Four of the five shootings last month meet that definition.

GI-TOC recorded one mass killing in January and one in February. By June, the monthly count had reached eight, with eight also recorded in August and September. The September attacks alone killed 57 people.

GI-TOC does not have a reliable comparison with last year, according to Rademeyer. He said the group counted 17 mass killings in 2025, but warned that this was an undercount because it only began tracking them separately this year and has since stepped up its data collection.

Why are we seeing so many mass killings?

There’s no single explanation. Rademeyer said mass killings occur across criminal markets, including illegal mining, extortion, gang activity and disputes over minibus-taxi routes. Organized crime accounts for a minority of gun deaths but is associated with some of the deadliest attacks, he said.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said in February that organized crime was “the most immediate threat to our democracy, our society and our economic development” and announced that soldiers would be deployed to help police tackle gang violence.

There’s no indication that the five most recent shootings, including two in the Cape Town area and one south of the city of Durban, are linked. Investigators are considering different possible motives, including criminal feuds, retaliation and a business dispute.

The deadliest of the five was the Johannesburg tavern shooting last Saturday and police are investigating whether that was linked to a turf war involving illegal mining or retaliation for an earlier shooting at the same tavern.

Illegal mining has fueled violence around Johannesburg for years. Informal miners, known locally as “zama zamas,” work in abandoned gold mines, while rival groups fight for control of the business. Around Wedela, Reuters reported that criminal gangs run the operations and use armed men to protect their territory.

Where are the guns coming from?

GI-TOC has documented weapons moving from neighboring Namibia into South Africa and reaching gangs and robbers involved in cash-in-transit heists.

Maphosa said illegal guns can also come from weapons stolen or lost by civilians and the state, as well as through corruption and cross-border trafficking.

“An AK-47 does not arrive at a tavern by itself,” he said. “There is a supply chain behind the firearm and ammunition.”

About 63,500 licensed civilian firearms were reported lost or stolen between 2013 and 2023, according to figures Rademeyer cited.

He also cited police data showing that since April 2022, 2,346 police firearms have been stolen and another 177 lost, along with 194,920 rounds of ammunition.

Former police colonel Christiaan Prinsloo was convicted in 2016 after stealing more than 2,000 firearms from police stores and selling them on, including to gangs. According to local media reports, 888 of those weapons were later forensically linked to 1,066 murders in the Western Cape.

Why is it so hard to stop the violence?

Operation Vala Umgodi, the government’s crackdown on illegal mining, has led to thousands of arrests and the seizure of hundreds of firearms.

But Rademeyer said arresting large numbers of low-level participants will have limited impact if the people financing and supplying the networks remain untouched.

Police should also target buyers and refiners of illicit gold, financiers and gun suppliers, he said.

Rademeyer said police should trace recovered guns, clear the ballistics backlog and investigate non-fatal shootings, which can be warnings of more violence.

But tracing where guns came from and whether they have been used in other crimes is time-consuming. The head of ballistics at the police’s Forensic Science Laboratory told a Commission of Inquiry last year that the unit had a backlog of 41,846 cases and more than 29,000 crime-linked firearms in storage.

Maphosa said authorities need to look beyond recovering illegal guns and focus on stopping them from reaching criminal networks in the first place.

“We are counting the guns coming out,” he said. “We must also count, trace and stop the guns going in.

“The real measure of success is how many people we prevent from being shot.”

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