In August 2026 I asked the organisers of the South African 4x4 & Outdoor Show one question: "Good day, will I be welcome with my licensed firearm?"

The answer: "It is against the law to carry firearms at events."

There is no such law.

Welcome at the gate. Defenceless on the road.

The Firearms Control Act regulates only how a firearm must be carried in public. It does not bar one from a show.

To their credit, when I wrote and set out the sections, the organisers checked, agreed and corrected themselves within a day. Their rule now reads honestly: "No firearms are permitted at the show." That is their right, and I do not dispute it.

But look at what their rule does.

You drive to these events, often for hours, and often home again after dark. In the first three months of 2026, Gauteng alone recorded 2 062 carjackings, 57,1% of every carjacking in the country.

Their rule asks me to drive my family into that and home again in the dark, with no way to defend them if we are the ones it happens to. They want us at their show, and they want the ticket price – they simply do not want us able to protect ourselves getting there and back. The organiser carries none of that risk. The family in the car carries all of it.

There is not even safe-keeping at the gate. So the firearm stays in a parked car all day - which is how a licensed firearm becomes a criminal's firearm, and how a lawful owner ends up behind bars. Section 120(8) of the Firearms Control Act bites both ways here: it is an offence to leave a firearm neither carried on the person, nor under direct control, nor locked in a prescribed safe, and it is an offence to lose one through that failure. Either carries up to five years' imprisonment, and a conviction can cost him every licence he holds.

Meanwhile the show's own official 2026 programme lists LASER SHOOTING, ARCHERY and PAINTBALL under "ACTIVITIES FOR THE KIDS", on both days.

At this show, shooting is acceptable as a children's attraction, but not in the hands of the licensed adult who drove that child there.

This is not theoretical. HuntEx, at the Gallagher Convention Centre, publishes a Gun Carry Policy which permits visitors to carry, quotes section 84 in full, and confines handling to designated safety zones. Nothing is surrendered at the gate. It has worked that way for years.

To the South African 4x4 & Outdoor Show and every other event organiser and venue owner in South Africa:

1. Allow lawfully licensed firearms, carried in accordance with section 84 of the Firearms Control Act. This is the ask. Nothing else answers it.

2. If you will not, then at the very least provide properly secured safe-keeping at the gate - operated by a person authorised under the Act to receive them.

For my own safety, and that of my family, I will not attend an event that bars my lawfully licensed firearm. That is my own decision.

If it is yours too, sign and share.

Disarmament does not only arrive by statute. It arrives one condition of entry at a time.

They want us at the show. They do not want us able to get there and home.

- A concerned law-abiding firearm owner, South Africa