This archive report was first published on 9 January 2020.
On January 9, 2020, Ethiopia's parliament passed legislation aimed at curbing gun ownership following a surge in regional ethnic violence blamed on a proliferation of small arms in private hands.
According to the government, over the previous year, they had seized 21 machine guns, more than 33,000 handguns, 275 rifles, and 300,000 bullets in different parts of the Horn of Africa country.
Security forces confiscated a further 2,221 handguns and 71 Kalashnikov assault rifles in Gonder in the Amhara region in October, which had been smuggled into the country in oil trucks from Sudan.
The spread of small arms has been partly blamed for hundreds of killings in various ethnic conflicts over the past two years, displacing more than 2.7 million people.
Lawmaker Tesfaye Daba stated, 'There is a significant number of guns in our society since the previous government, and the law will help us to formalise ownership.'
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government has implemented sweeping liberal reforms since he came to power in 2018, which have won international praise but also lifted the lid on long-repressed tensions between the country's many ethnic groups.
The new law provides for each region to stipulate a legal age for gun ownership, limits the number of firearms an individual can own to one, and imposes prison terms of up to three years for violations.
It also bans private trade in weaponry and allows only certain government institutions to import guns, with those found to have involved themselves in arms trafficking facing prison terms of eight to 20 years.
