More than 7000 guns were lost or stolen in South Africa last year - increasing the number of illegal weapons floating around. Speaking at a national firearms summit in parliament yesterday, Reneva Fourie of the Civilian Secretariat for Police said in the past year, 5195 privately owned guns had been stolen and 233 lost. The rate of loss and theft among police and correctional services officers also remained "too high" at 1769 stolen and 199 lost.The two-day summit, attended by police, NGOs and gun rights groups, is being held ahead of changes to the laws on firearms.Among the proposed changes is harsher penalties on those who lose or have their guns stolen through negligence.Chair of the parliamentary portfolio committee on police Francois Beukman said the death of Bafana Bafana captain Senzo Meyiwa had played a "huge role" in opening up the discussion about firearms and their regulation.Professor Sebastian van As of the Red Cross Children's Hospital in Cape Town argued that the legal gun-owning age should be raised to 25 years. The current age is 21."The frontal lobe of the brain, which is important in decision- making, only matures at 25," he argued.Van As said the Red Cross Hospital treated 476 gunshot wounds in children last year. Of these, 43% had been children who had been shot in gang crossfire.Two percent of children had been injured when they played with guns, and 5% had purposefully been shot by gangsters.Van As also cited a national femicide study, which showed that 1147 women (one in every three killed) were shot. Over 400 had been killed by their intimate partners.One in five men committed suicide after killing their partner - most of them with a legal gun.Ten percent of the men who killed their partners were employed as security guards, with 89% of them using legal guns.Trauma specialist Dr Lane Benjamin said the focus needed to be on mental health as South Africans had for so long been exposed to violence, that it had affected the wiring of their brains.A study she conducted in Hanover Park revealed that 98.9% of the 617 adolescents interviewed had witnessed violence, and 68.9% had seen someone get shot in their neighbourhood.She said those who witnessed violence daily became programmed for survival, resulting in children being wired to react to threat, disconnecting from their feelings and limited rational thinking - making it easier for them to become killers themselves."These stats show that our kids are growing up in war zones."..