Switzerland Bans Ammunition in the Home

by Dave C. Jones

San Diego, CA - 4 Aug 2009 @ 0830 PDT - The last bastion of firearms rights—Switzerland—appears to have all but disappeared. I must have missed a bunch of newspaper and TV news reports from September 2007 until today. It turns out that the Swiss are no longer as heavily armed as they used to be. In fact, the U.S. may actually out rank them as the most heavily armed country in the world.

In September 2007, Switzerland passed a law preventing all but a handful of Swiss men from keeping ammunition at their homes. So, even though all able-bodied men must enter military service and keep a rifle at home, they won't be allowed the ammunition to fire the guns.. Pretty stupid, if you ask me.

It was only Switzerland's privately owned firearms (and ammunition) that prevented them from being attacked in WWI and WWII and that has helped them remain neutral in several other wars. Apparently today's Swiss think they are too good to be attacked in the future and they don't need to protect themselves. Or, perhaps, they think the U.S. will bail them out like we bail out every other country that can't (or won't) help themselves.

Unfortunately, it seems that the short-sightedness and egos of the Swiss have led to their effective disarming of the population. After a few shootings with "army" guns, the population is calling for a ban on all guns—the ammunition is just a first step. In an all too familiar to U.S. gun owner statement, the Swiss government said that they do not want to ban all guns and that hunters should not worry about keeping their guns for hunting.

Give me a break. Owning guns for hunting is no the point. The point of private ownership of guns is to protect against crime, foreign invasions, and domestic tyranny.

Additionally, using suicides and murders as a reason to ban guns or ammunition is disingenuous. No law will ever prevent all murders, rapes, suicides, etc. Given that Switzerland has approximately 2.3 million guns in circulation, 280 deaths per year from firearms is minuscule. That means that only one in 8,214 guns has been used in a suicide or murder. (Compare that to the 250,851,833 cars registered in the U.S. in 2006 and the 42,642 deaths attributed to cars that year. Those numbers mean that one car out of every 5,882 caused a death. In other words, you are 140% more likely to die from a car than from a gun, but I don't hear anyone calling for bans on cars or gasoline!)

But, like liberals in any other country, every life is precious and even one death is too many. Never mind the many more that will die from not having the firearms in the hands of private citizens. As in the U.S., Swiss liberals can't see the forest for the trees. God help the Swiss!

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Dave Jones is not your typical liberal California criminal defense trial attorney. He is a libertarian who believes in less government, more guns, and greater freedom–in short, the principles on which this country was founded. He can be reached at his law firm, the American Justice Center, via e-mail at djones at AmericanJusticeCenter.com. Read more of his writings at blog.AmericanJusticeCenter.com.