A Swiss Army citizen soldier armed with a SIG SG 550 assault rifle at the Swiss Army Show in 2023. (Michael Derrer Fuchs, Shutterstock)
March 15, 2024
“Americans and Swiss citizens have some of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, but their gun cultures differ dramatically,” asserts the description of the YouTube video “Why the Swiss Love Their Guns (More Than Americans).” “One country saw more than 500 mass shootings in 2023 alone, while another country saw less than a handful of shootings over the past 20 years. To understand why there is such a stark difference between the gun cultures of these two countries, we traveled to Switzerland Let's see how each of these cultures started, and where they started to separate.
There are a lot of assumptions that video journalist Johnny Harris has packed into his summary, and it becomes clear early on that, as is the case with “agenda science,” he is directing his “findings” to reinforce the conclusions he sets out to “confirm.” For one thing, as an admitted novice at first-time shooting at a Swiss range, he de facto admits that he has no experience in American “gun culture” to compare to, which means he makes a judgment based on mainstream “news” and hearsay. And bias.
Festive atmosphere
We learned about Swiss archery at a community festival centered around a teen archery competition.
“The government gives its citizens guns and trains them how to shoot,” Harris recounts. Every village is required to have access to a shooting range. “We have nearly as many guns per head or person as we have in America. Back home in the US, we also have a lot of guns, but the culture around guns is a little different.
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“Switzerland is proving that there is no need for more gun rules,” he asserts before parroting a story straight out of the gun playbook. “Guns are the number one cause of death among children in the United States, but we don’t have the will to stop them. Switzerland has the lowest crime rate in Europe. That’s all we have at this point, God and our guns.”
A sweeping web of deception
It would be helpful if he did not automatically buy into the illicit propaganda, but in doing so he relieves us of the duty to regard him as a neutral and objective observer.
“Guns are not the primary cause of child deaths,” explains John Lott, an economist, author, and president of the Center for Crime Prevention Research. The problem, of course, is that the citizen disarmament lobby includes young adult urban gang members in its calculations to scare the pack into believing that little suburban Timmy and Susie are routinely blowing each other up because Dad left a Glock in his sock drawer.
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Likewise, the editorial assertion about “mass shootings” is subject to proscriptive manipulation by ignoring the Justice Department’s definition as “any incident in which at least four people are killed by a gun” and inflating the numbers as the Gun Violence Archive does. By counting “at least four shooting victims, either injured or killed…” In any case, as Lott once again demonstrated, “94% of mass public shootings occur in places where the use of weapons is prohibited.”
They also occur in well-known places, which are mostly democratic urban areas.
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“Homicides in the US are highly concentrated: 2% of counties saw 56% of homicides in 2020, and 52% of US counties saw no homicides,” Lott explains in another paper. “Murder is not a national problem. It is a problem in a small group of urban areas, and even in those counties, homicides are concentrated in small areas within them…”
The inconvenient fact that complete observers must tread carefully at the risk of being accused of hate motivation is that Switzerland is a country with an almost homogeneous demographic, and similar results can be demonstrated for a peaceful population in the United States to show that they can and do so consistently. Coexisting peacefully with weapons. Case in point, as author and attorney David B. “Another indication that social norms are more important than gun laws is that Japanese Americans, Those with access to firearms have a lower violent crime rate than Japanese in Japan.
Anecdotally, we can note the absence of violent crimes attributable to the five million or so members of the NRA and other national and state groups, arguably the most armed but peaceful civilian population on the planet, more than “Competitive.” With the Swiss experience. Unlike the citizen disarmament meme promoted by Brady, Giffords, Everytown and its mothers demanding a group of hysterical cat ladies, the issue is not weapons, but a reflection of a population negatively impacted by the ongoing history of destructive and racist government “equality” policies. Along with “catch and release” protocols for chronic and habitual sociopaths.
Culture clash
This in turn leads to other facts about the main differences between cultures, not “weapon cultures”. Once again, Switzerland and the United States are very different in terms of public attitudes, depending on prevailing regional policies.
The Swiss collectively celebrate their weapons and do not think about the ranges (designed to prevent stray bullets) that stretch across the highways from the shooting spot to the target. Here in the United States, we've all heard stories about housing developments being built near ranges with disgruntled new homeowners then complaining about the noise and forcing a closure.
In Switzerland, shooting is a family activity and children are integrated into the culture through proper safety and skills training. And in the United States, unless you are part of a traditional family that values gun ownership and use, the focus is on avoidance and ignorance, which only contributes to the tragedy and subsequent demand that gun owners “be safe.”
In Switzerland, the population is generally enthusiastic and supportive of gun ownership, including “weapons of war.” Here half or more of them are Democrats and vote for politicians who want to ban all guns, not just semi-autos with standard capacity magazines, and dictate where and how they can be kept and carried, preferably not at all.
As for differences in “gun cultures,” if you are talking about America, a fair question would be “which culture?” There are “diverse” new gun-owning members of the so-called “Gun Culture 2.0” who value firearms primarily for self-defense but who still, in an act or political cognitive dissonance, may vote Democratic because of other priorities they see as more important, such as abortion. Ditto there are sports shooters and hunters who embody the definition of “Fudds,” like the propaganda Democrats posing as “sportsmen and women for Biden,” or Giffords’ politically dishonest “Gun Owners for Safety.”
Once again, the videographer shows Harris missing the barn, and it's not about the culture “likes guns more.” Because while there's no shortage of admiration for the craftsmanship, mechanics, and everything that can make for the form, function, and elegant design of “gun porn” things, many “gun control” enforcers share the same appreciation for the hardware as “civilians.” University. But that is not the point of the Second Amendment. To repeat the truism, it's not about guns, it's about freedom.
A deliberate sabotage militia
Even among these laws, the focus of the “pro-gun” laws that are passed, such as “unauthorized carry,” and Second Amendment lawsuits against gun bans and “sensitive areas,” is on self-defense. While Switzerland ultimately seeks to preserve its historic militia system, and the freedom from foreign invasion that has been guaranteed (so far), advocacy for the Second Amendment in the United States has largely ignored the first thirteen words, the militia provisions codified in the Constitution. .
The government has deliberately ignored its stated responsibilities and created a National Guard system that, when combined with politically-prioritized law enforcement, effectively incorporates the standing army that the Founders feared throughout the Republic. Firearms News has provided some very rare warnings about how ignoring its basic purpose makes the Second Amendment more vulnerable to violations (Part 1 and Part 2). In addition, several states have enacted bans on citizens training together to defend their communities, and a new national bill, the “Private Paramilitary Activity Prevention Act,” was introduced in January by perennial citizen disarmament zealots Democrats, Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Jimmy Markey. Ruskin.
“Safety” dance.
Another assertion made by Harris is that “Switzerland is proving that there is no need for more arms bases,” which shows that he is oblivious to developments there, and completely influenced by the lie that he and the rest of the world have been bombarded since the first war. The violations were “justified.”
They are not about “public safety.” It is about the government having an unchallengeable monopoly on violence, or, frankly, about an elite and unaccountable group imposing totalitarian controls. If not, with all the emphasis on Switzerland being “crime-free,” what other justification could there be for Swiss voters in 2019 who fell for the propaganda trap of elites to overwhelmingly agree to align the country’s gun laws with those of Weapons in the country? European Union? (See “The Swiss bow again to the hat of foreign tyrants” by searching this article on the Firearms News website.)
And if there's one thing that the experiences of the United States and Europe make clear to everyone — even “journalists,” if they so choose — it's that those who want control take what they can get in increments. Rather than securing a target and saying “enough”, even though this invasion no longer required resources, they could then focus on the next achievable target in their long march toward disarming the global citizenry.
If you have any thoughts or comments about this article, we'd love to hear them. Email us at FirearmsNews@Outdoorsg.com.
