Gun Control And Swiss Suicides

Most liberals tell us they don’t hate guns, and they have no plans to confiscate yours. They just want to stop the “destructive effects” of guns, by which they mean “gun crime.” But is that true? What just happened in Switzerland says it isn’t.

Switzerland has a lengthy gun tradition. For at least 800 years now, the Swiss have drafted virtually every able-bodied male into the army. As part of their service, they’ve kept their weapons at home. And when they left the service, they were allowed to keep their weapons. Thus, it’s not uncommon for Swiss families to have rifles, pistols, and even fully automatic machine guns in their homes. Current estimates say there are two million guns in Switzerland, a land of only eight million people.

Since we “know” guns cause crime, Switzerland must be a killing zone, right? Actually no. Gun crime in Switzerland is virtually nonexistent. It’s so low they don’t even bother keeping official statistics on gun crime. It is, in fact, lower than the gun crime rate in Japan, which absolutely bans guns. Switzerland ranks as the fourth safest country in the world and its violent crime rate is 1/100th that of England.

That means Switzerland must have strong gun control laws, right? Actually, no. Gun sales by the Swiss government are registered. BUT gun sales from one individual to another are regulated only in five of the twenty-six cantons. Retail gun dealers do not keep records of over-the-counter transactions, nor are such transactions reported to the government. So why do groups like the Brady Campaign claim the Swiss are heavily regulated? Because Switzerland proves that (1) the presence of guns does not cause crime and (2) the absence of gun control does not cause crime.

Despite the almost nonexistence of any gun harm in Switzerland, an international coalition of leftist groups recently tried to pass a law to take guns away from Swiss homes and require they be kept in armories. Sanity prevailed and the initiative lost: 20 of 26 cantons rejected the initiative, as did 56.3% of the population (it had to be approved both by the people and the cantons to pass).

So what was the gun groups’ ostensible reason for pushing this imitative? Gun suicides. According to these groups, Switzerland has the highest level of gun suicides in Europe. But is that a legitimate claim? Consider this.

1. Switzerland’s suicide rate is not appreciably higher than the rest of Western Europe, and is significantly lower than Eastern Europe. So there’s no logical reason to think guns contribute to Switzerland’s suicide rate.

2. Nor is gun suicide a serious problem. Switzerland has about 1,500 suicides each year, with about 340 (23%) of those involving guns. But this represents only 0.00425% of the population.

3. Suicide is acceptable in Switzerland. Indeed, Switzerland has become infamous for “suicide tourism” because you have a right to assisted suicide in Switzerland if you are “suffering from an illness that inevitably leads to death, or from an unacceptable disability.” In other words, you don’t even need to be suffering yet, when you decide to off yourself. Several people have used this law to kill themselves long before they began displaying symptoms of diseases. So logically, if there’s nothing wrong with committing suicide at the nearest suicide booth, then why is it suddenly a crisis when guns are used?

This is the real issue. Gun control groups have created a pretext. That have seized upon something they would otherwise consider acceptable when guns aren’t involved and they’ve spun this into a crisis that requires almost every household in Switzerland to hand in their guns, even though this "crisis" involves only 340 people a year, i.e. less than 0.00425% of the population -- 1 out of every 25,000 people (three people per NFL stadium). And to make this number sound large, they’ve compared it against other countries in a way that makes it sound large, even though overall suicide rates in Western Europe are fairly similar. . . and the slight increases in Switzerland and Denmark can be accounted for by assisted suicide.

What this tell us, is that there is a real dishonesty among the gun control crowd, the same dishonesty that has them lying about the level of gun control in Switzerland because Switzerland puts the lie to all of their claims. And what they're trying to do with this initiative is to eliminate the world's most obvious example that guns don't kill people, liberal permissive culture kills people.

Finally, let me point out the other side of the equation which the gun groups conveniently ignore. Do you really think Switzerland is the fourth safest country in the world by accident? Or do you think the possession of these weapons by everyone has a role in that? And if that’s the case, ask yourself two questions: (1) how many of those 340 suicides will actually be stopped by this, and (2) how many of those 8 million people will die as victims of crime once they’re disarmed?