>>>Kinda gives you pause... a kindly, 50-something motherly accountant with her AK...
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>>Most break-ins to private residences are not attackers "going in guns blazing". The most common form of house break in is that the attackers wait for you to open the gate on returning home and then run in behind you, gun or knife at your face, and then the shit happens. People get smacked around, sometimes much worse.
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>second hand opinion, but I'd exchange sometimes with usually.

I don't agree with using "usually" because: I don't know the ratio of non-violet crime vs. somewhat violent crime vs. very violent crime. I think this will be hard to quantify and I even doubt these statistics exist. Hearsay and opinion are not good indicators because as humans we will tend to repeat the most scary stories more and they get worse with the re-telling. I know many people who have been directly affected by crime, including ourselves, and I would say there is always some physical aspect (smacking, punching, getting tied up, threatened, etc.), assuming you are in the house during the crime, and about 10% something much, much worse. My best guess is that the bell curve (if you could draw one) would apply. At one extreme the guy just wants what he can grab and runs away. At the other extreme the women are raped and the men beaten to within a inch of their lives and the bulk of crime is somewhere in between (we and those we know fall in this range of crime exposure). I could get more accurate info from police friends of mine but being a victim of crime is awful in all cases.


>>Many houses, especially in the Cape province, have no high walls, or no electric fence on top of the walls, or no armed security service. This is much more a Johannesburg phenomenon. I know several people living in the Cape and they have no security service, no alarms in their house, no weapons, no access controlled area.
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>True. But the climate in Capetown seems to be shifting more to the Joburg state of affairs - again second hand opinion, but source is a very good friend with biz/flats in Joburg and Capetown, having moved residency to Durban as his new wife lives there...

Actually I would say the climate in Cape Town might be getting better because more and more affluent people are moving to the Cape every year. But of course, like any large area, it depends on where your friend operates. There are good and bad, worse and better, areas in every city and the Cape is very big. Your friend should know that Durban has a worse crime zone than the Cape or Johannesburg.