Switzerland: So Many Guns, No Mass Shooting

[BlueMTexpat]

This was posted on FB; from The Daily Show.

I live in this lovely country and wish so much that the US could be as common sense about guns as Switzerland is:

***********
As an expatriate American with Swiss residence, I also wish that if we insist on having private medical insurance that it could be modelled on the Swiss system.

But that is another story.

There is SO much that we can learn from others, if we are willing to.

[Irish_Dem]

1. We could have what other countries have, easily.

The US is the richest country in the history of the world.

We just don't want the same comfort and safety as other countries.

[BlueMTexpat]

14. ...

[twodogsbarking]

2. We are not Switzerland.

[róisín_dubh]

3. No kidding, but why?

Switzerland has loads of guns, but no mass shootings.
So why do suppose this is so, since we're not Switzerland?

[Novara]

4. this is societal

America has this toxic macho principle of "going it alone," or "pulling yourself up with your bootstraps," or you name some other idiotic cliche that essentially means we don't rely on anyone for help because we're so tough and independent.

Switzerland has a strong sense of community and a strong social safety net. They believe that you're only as strong as your weakest link, so strengthening that weak link makes everyone stronger. They are invested in their communities.

America is invested in itself.

Plus - and this is a biggie - our politicians are bought and our system encourages pay for play. Don't you think that if republicans weren't getting millions of dollars from the NRA they might enact gun reforms? If they were not bought by the fossil fuel industry they might support clean energy development?

Who has seen Bowling for Columbine? Remember Michael Moore's focus on the differences in Canadian society versus American society? Other countries simply do not have the independent mindset that we have here, to our detriment. We push people to "go it alone" and when they don't succeed, we discard them as if they don't matter. Other countries support them.

[BlueMTexpat]

7. This is so true,

unfortunately! Thank you for your post!

[BlueMTexpat]

13. Please check DFW's

and my posts below.

And please watch the video.

[róisín_dubh]

23. It was a rhetorical question.

I don't live in the US anymore. While I don't live in Switzerland, I'm pretty familiar with Swiss culture and society.

[BlueMTexpat]

24. ...

[Igel]

21. Here's a non-lethal parallel.

Shortly after I started work at a high school, we had 4,000 students. 8000 potential fists. We had a student fight every few weeks.

Now we have about 3500 students. We have a few fights every week. 15 school days/fight to 1.5 school days/fight.

The cause wasn't an increase in the number of fists--there are 1000 fewer fists in circulation. With 13% fewer fists, you'd expect 13% fewer fights. Not 10x more.

It's worse than it sounds because if you get in a fight, you're in alternative school for 60 school days. For the first two months or so of the school year, there are no repeat offenders.

Yes, it would be worse if the idjits had knives or even guns. At the same time, it's not the fists that provoke the violence, break the occasional bone, or send the occasional kid to the hospital.

Why do you suppose there was a change in the fight rate?

[BlueMTexpat]

12. Indeed.

We would have a much more civilied nation if we were.

[Ferrets are Cool]

18. No shit

But what does that have to do with the statistics?

[Celerity]

20. Thanks for clearing that up. We (Sweden) are also no Switzerland.

[twodogsbarking]

5. Wikipedia

[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Switzerland|


The article is right wing shit.

[twodogsbarking]

6. And this

[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country|

[Igel]

22. That has to be part of a pair. It's really homicides/gun that matters.

The US has more guns per capita. But Switzerland has far, far fewer homicides per gun. That's what people are really getting at.

So the prediction since we have the highest gun per capita rate has to be we have the highest intentional homicide rate. That's sort of one of the assumptions that's made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#/media/File:20201023_UNODC_Intentional_homicides_by_country_-_highest_rates_and_most_populous_countries.png

The countries with the highest intentional homicide rates very often have far fewer guns per capita than the US; each gun kills more people. So in a sense we're not Switzerland, but we have some Switzerland-like traits, we underachieve in the efficacy of our guns to murder. (It's an underachievement we should encourage, of course.) So we have far fewer intentional homicides than the gun ownership rate would seem to predict. Why? The US has probably 3 different cultural traditions, using a fairly broad brush. One of them, one of the largest, is very Switzerland like. Another is very much un-Swiss. You average the two, you get a number that's pretty unrepresentative of most areas of the country. Sort of like having a room with 10 6'6" people and 10 5'2" people and decreeing that the average height of people in the room is 5/10". A 5'10" person walking into the room and expecting to see most people with the same height would be rather surprised.

Look at a map showing distribution of homicides per 100,000 population and consider not just the current distribution but also which areas of the country provided emigrants to other areas of the US. That one part of the country is very Swiss-like really does mean it's culture.

[BlueMTexpat]

9. My post is a video

from The Daily Show. When has TDS been RW?

If you watch it, you can see how appalled Swiss gun owners are by the state of things in the US.

They think that we are a joke and have no idea of how to control guns or ourselves.

I suggest that you watch it without your bias. You may actually learn something.

And it is a fact that we have almost NO mass shootings here.

By the way, I do NOT own a gun and never will.

[twodogsbarking]

19. Insult taken. Exactly what is my bias and what do I need to learn?

You seem to know all so please share.

[DFW]

8. Two major factors

No Fox “News” or National Hate Radio, and….
Their country is run by Swiss democrats (small d), and not American Republicans (capital R).

[BlueMTexpat]

11. Thanks, DFW!

Those are the two main things.

Other points made in the video.

- All Swiss males have mandatory military service (where they learn how to use and respect guns)
- Per regulations, guns and ammo must be stored separately
- All gun owners must demonstrate a sense of civic responsibility

And more ...

While Switzerland is not perfect by any means and there are indeed accidents with guns and some gun violence, usually domestic-violence related, we have almost NO mass shootings.

Even the staunchest gun owners here are appalled at what is happening in the US.

[allegorical oracle]

10. Maybe requiring these folks to have guns is the answer. They're such contrarians who so resent

gubment telling them what to do (get vaccinated, wear masks, register guns) that they might cash in their stockades for a well-run, lucrative buy-back.

[BlueMTexpat]

15. I think that

mandatory national service of some kind might also help.

But, of course, that is the "gubment" again.

People are too caught up in their own parochial interests and only listen to those who share or reinforce their own views.

National service is one way to bring people from disparate communities together and learn how their similarities are greater than their differences. Once they experience that, their view of the world generally changes for the better.

FYI: I am a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. And proud of it!

[AntivaxHunters]

16. "National service"

That hasn't helped here.

Mass Shooters’ Histories in the U.S. Military Most Amazing Coincidence
https://davidswanson.org/mass-shooters-histories-in-the-u-s-military-most-amazing-coincidence/

Obviously having been a member of the U.S. military can’t have any causal connection to mass shootings, and that’s why it makes the most amazing coincidence over and over again that so many individuals who’ve been trained to kill lots of people bizarrely end up killing lots of people.

Another mass shooter in Florida just happens to have been in the military. The man who killed with a van in Toronto this year had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation. The mass-killing in a Florida High School earlier this year was also promoted by the killer as a military operation, in the sense that he wore his JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) shirt and killed in the same school where the U.S. Army had trained him to shoot and instructed him in war-supporting views of the world and its history.

Looking at a long list of mass shootings in the United States, almost all of the shooters are men, and almost all of them are between ages 18 and 59. Above age 59, the percentage of men in the general U.S. population who are veterans leaps up dramatically. Between 18 and 59 — by averaging the percentages for each age year — about 14.76 percent of U.S. men are veterans, but at least 35% of these shooters were veterans. I determined that by quickly reading available news reports online about each shooting, so the percentage is likely to be significantly higher. I found no news reports that stated that any of the shooters had not been in the military.

In U.S. mass shootings, military veterans are over twice as likely to be mass shooters, and probably more likely than that. Needless to say, this is a statistic about a large population, not information about any particular individual. Needless to say, profiling and discrimination are counterproductive. But here’s what else might be counterproductive: Training people in the arts of mass murder, launching wars, and dropping people trained for wars and having suffered through wars into a heavily armed society taught by schools and entertainment systems that mass-killing is the way to solve problems. Mass killing in the United States gets you on the news, and if you happen to be a president bombing a distant land it gets you widely praised and labeled as “finally presidential.”

[BlueMTexpat]

17. Please take into

consideration that this is the "all-volunteer" military, which is often the only option for those who are among the most marginalized in our society, AND that our military has been engaged in seemingly endless wars since 2001, thanks primarily to GQPers.

There has also been little to no follow up support for medical or psychological conditions resulting from these endless wars and the traumas our veterans have received.