It's been more than seven years since the whiff of corruption emerged from the Central Firearms Registry in Pretoria, with the suspension of two senior police officers accused of accepting bribes.
The usual assurances and pledges of crackdowns were made then and have been repeated regularly since by senior police officers and politicians, but solutions have proved more difficult to manufacture and the whiff has gradually turned into an abiding stench.
"The bottom line is that high-level corruption over a number of years and several attempts to clean [the registry] have not borne any fruit," according to Mark Shaw, director of the respected Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime.
Shaw was speaking after the assassination in Cape Town nine days ago of Lt-Col Charl Kinnear, an anti-gang unit commander who was investigating an alleged conspiracy between police officers and underworld figures that has placed untold numbers of "legal" guns in the hands of criminals.
"Kinnear stumbled onto this and began the process of investigation, and now he is dead," said Shaw.
Even though Kinnear had made himself unpopular in the underworld with a series of investigations, and had accused fellow police officers in Cape Town of corruption, several police sources told the Sunday Times this week they were convinced it was the firearms investigation that sealed his fate.
It should be no surprise that the instrument of Kinnear's death was a gun. More than 3-million have been licensed in the past 15 years or so, and the head of forensic pathology in the Western Cape said last year that gunshots have increased exponentially as the primary mechanism of murder.
Police minister Bheki Cele angered the gun lobby earlier this year with talk of amending the law to limit individual owners to one firearm.
While time and oxygen are consumed arguing about this in the months and years ahead, Cele is in danger of failing to see the wood for the trees.
If Kinnear's death is not to be in vain, the best move the minister can make is to ensure the detective's guns-to-gangs investigation brings down the conspirators bent on turning SA into a criminals' paradise.
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