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Tighter gun ownership laws are pushing South Africans to buy crossbows, spears, swords, knives and pepper sprays to protect themselves from violent crime.

"We've had to build an entirely new shop because the demand from people is so great," Justin Willmers, owner of Durban Guns and Ammo, told Reuters. "It can be anything from a Zulu fighting spear, battle axes, swords, crossbows."

New gun controls came into force last year under South Africa's Firearms Control Act, but some weapons shop owners say high crime rates are pushing law abiding citizens to look for alternative means of defending themselves.

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With some homeowners worried about prosecution if they kill intruders, the crossbow is particularly popular because of its silence and the difficulty of tracing the firer from forensic evidence, he said.

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Surely, if you shoot an intruder with your trusty crossbow, you're going to produce one rather obvious piece of forensic evidence that won't need a lot of tracking -- a corpus delicious lying there on your property with an arrow sticking out of him/her.

No?

The notion that a neighbourhood would be crawling with people wandering about with crossbows is just a touch far-fetched, no? Or maybe not ...

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Originally posted by skdadl:
I'm trying to get my head around the logic of this ... a corpus delicious lying there on your property with an arrow sticking out of him/her.

No?

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I guess the guy in Ottawa had one of these compact models.

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Originally posted by Mike Keenan:
BTW, what's the legal status of crossbows in Canada?

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From the Canadian Firearms Certre:

Q. Do the licensing and registration requirements apply to bows?

Crossbows that can be aimed and fired with one hand and crossbows with an overall length of 500 mm (about 19.68 inches) or less are prohibited. Individuals cannot lawfully possess a prohibited crossbow. Licensed businesses may possess prohibited crossbows for a purpose set out in section 22 of the Firearms Licence Regulations for businesses.

Businesses and individuals do not need a licence or registration certificate under the Firearms Act to possess other types of bows, including crossbows that are longer than 500 mm and require the use of two hands.

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Originally posted by Mike Keenan:
BTW, what's the legal status of crossbows in Canada?

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"PART 3 PROHIBITED WEAPONS
Former Prohibited Weapons Order, No. 3

7. A crossbow or similar device that

(a) is designed or altered to be aimed and fired by the action of one hand, whether or not it has been redesigned or subsequently altered to be aimed and fired by the action of both hands; or

(b) has a length not exceeding 500 mm.

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Any cross-bow is a "weapon" for the purposes of the Criminal Code.

Without doing some research, I'm really not sure about standard crossbows as far as registration requirements go.

Edited to note the previous post

[ 17 March 2005: Message edited by: James ]

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Originally posted by Mike Keenan:
Hmm. I guess that's because a hand crossbow is a terrific assassination weapon, being silent and all.

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los!

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"Edward III had an enormous force of archers which shot down first of all the Genoese crossbowmen, who they outranged and outshot.

"This was one of the great shocks to European powers. The archers absolutely annihilated the crossbowmen, who were supposed to be the top shooters in the world's armies.

"But when the French started cavalry charging us we stopped them dead in their tracks. We killed them until they were piled up dead and dying in a wall, so the next wave of cavalry met an obstacle and while they were milling around finding a way through they were shot to pieces at quite short range."

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[ 17 March 2005: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]

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Originally posted by al-Qa'bong:
English Yeomen and their longbows, who wiped out the Genoese crossbowmen fighting for the French at the battle of Crécy in 1346, made the crossbow obsolete.

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Well, no they didn't. For the same reasons they didn't make muskets obsolete--after all, Napoleonic muskets had poorer range and a slower rate of fire than longbows. I sometimes wonder what a good longbow force might have done in the Napoleonic wars . . .
However, a good longbowman needs to be trained for years and years, plus the ammunition is expensive. Crossbows are a lot easier to aim and don't need to be held at full draw by the firer's muscle power. I, personally, really severely doubt I could draw a hundred-pound-pull longbow once, let alone a bunch of times. Essentially, it's hard to create a serious longbow force unless you have a stable and prosperous yeomanry and you have them all do regular militia training with those bows over a long period of time. You also need to make sure there's lots of the right stuff growing to make arrows out of.
So, there's no way you could develop a longbow force in most countries, and indeed the conditions rather disappeared in England a good part of the time. France, for instance, didn't have a prosperous yeomanry, they had a downtrodden peasantry, and they probably didn't dare let them train on an ongoing basis with effective weapons. Indeed, I have an inkling they may have banned longbows. Italy not only didn't have a prosperous yeomanry by and large, it also tended to be way too politically unstable to successfully introduce such a long-term training regime. And so on.