The New Australian
Switzerland: Europe’s gun centre
where kids don’t kill kids

By Gerard Jackson
No. 124, 21-27 June 1999

The Littleton killings have once again brought into the spotlight America’s alleged
love affair with guns and its violent nature. Horror story after horror story is
wheeled out to demonstrate this ‘fact’. Statistic after statistic is faithfully recited to
convince people that the horrors would go away if only guns were banned.
According to this mantra, guns are the real evil, as if they were some kind of
voodoo curse. Because of this malignant force, according to Cameron Forbes,
American “teenagers plot to remedy slights by blowing away fellow students with
Tec-9s” (Guns: why the US can’t bite the bullet, The Australian 15/6).* Ergo,
remove the evil and the killings will cease.

But is it really so? Are guns the real culprit? What the likes of Forbes never tell
their readers is that America’s crime rate, and in particular its murder rate, were
much lower when access to guns was much easier. But let us go abroad to test the
thesis that the root of the evil is easy access to guns. If this were so then
Switzerland should be a war zone. In this country every male between aged 20 to
42 is required by law to to keep firearms, including pistols, at home; every reserve
keeps his assault rifle at home and every soldier takes his rifle home. Moreover,
once a soldier retires he is entitled to keep his weapon, whether it be a rifle or a
pistol. Not only that, but ordinary citizens are even allowed to buy military assault
rifles. In short, Mr Forbes, virtually every Swiss home is armed ? and not with
peashooters ? thus giving the Swiss citizenry more firepower than its American
counterpart.

It was the Swiss’ passion for guns only matched by their determination to keep
their liberty that helped keep the Nazi war machine at bay. When the Swiss
government thought a Nazi invasion was imminent it ordered every able bodied
man to stand by his post and defend it to the last round. Their determination to
defend their liberties plus their shooting skills and the sheer quantity of weapons at
their disposal combined with the nature of the terrain persuaded the Nazis that an
invasion of Switzerland was not worth the cost.

While other countries have tennis courts, golf courses, football pitches aplenty the
Swiss have shooting ranges. And Swiss shooters carry their guns in the open as
freely as golfers carry their clubs. Shooting festivals and contests are a frequent
and popular and children are encouraged to participate. Once again, what strikes
visitors about these events is the casual way weapons are carried through the
streets and on public transport. In restaurants and coffee shops tourists sometimes
find themselves competing with guns for places to hang their coats. Naturally there
is an ample supply of gun shops to service the country’s love affair with shooting.

Yet where is the crime wave? The school shootings? The nightly murders? A
colleague kindly supplied me with the following facts: In 1997 Switzerland
recorded only 87 premeditated murders and 102 murder attempts. The interesting
thing is that only 91 of these offences involved a gun, though out of a total of
2,498 robberies and attempted robberies 546 involved the use of guns. Of
particular interest is that nearly 50 per cent of these offences were committed by
foreigners. Compare Switzerland’s murder rate of 1.2 per 100,000 with Britain’s
rate of 1.4 per 100,000. Their respective robbery rates are 36 per 100,000 and
116 per 100,000 ? and bear in mind foreigners committed nearly half of
Switzerland’s robberies. The contrast between the two countries is particularly
striking when we consider that Britain’s gun laws are draconian compared with
Switzerland’s.

None of this is intended to promote gun ownership but only to demonstrate as
facile, if not fatuous, the view held by the likes of Forbes that guns are the real
problem in America. People who are determined to kill will do so, unfortunately.
And if they are resolved to use guns as the means to commit murder then they will
do that too. I cannot help but think that what are now called subcultures in
America are largely the nihilistic product of more than 30 years of successful
cultural warfare by liberalism against America’s basic standards of decency. The
kind of standards that so many Australian journalists (and American ones too) find
so odious.

*Note: Is it any wonder I despair of the Australian media. Georgina Safe
wrote that to deal with teenage killers the US government must implement
“policies to fight inequality, such as tax breaks for low-income earners
and measure to fight racism” (When boys goes bad, The Australian, 23/6).
That the Littleton killers were the sons of well-off white families who
chose some of their victims on the basis of religion and none on race
completely eluded her. To my knowledge, not one Australian newspaper
reported the fact that the killers murdered one student because she
expressed her faith in God.