Swiss Shooting Culture ‘Documentary' Reinforces False Narrative to Justify ‘Gun Control'

“Americans and Swiss citizens have some of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, but their gun cultures differ wildly,” the description to the YouTube video “Why the Swiss Love Their Guns (more than Americans)” asserts. “One country has seen over 500 mass shootings in 2023 alone, while the other has had less than a handful over the past twenty years. To understand why there’s such a stark difference between these two countries’ gun cultures, we traveled to Switzerland to see how each of these cultures started, and where they began to part ways.”

That’s a lot of assumptions video journalist Johnny Harris packs into his summary, and it becomes apparent early on that, as with “agenda science,” he steers his “findings” to bolster conclusions he set out to “confirm.” For one thing, as an admitted novice shooting for the first time at a Swiss range, he’s de facto admitting he has no experience with U.S. “gun culture” by which to compare, which means he’s rendering judgment based on mainstream “news,” hearsay, and bias.

A festive atmosphere

We’re introduced to Swiss shooting at a community festival centered around a shooting competition for teenagers.

“The government gives its citizens guns and trains them how to shoot. Every village is required to have access to a shooting range,” Harris narrates. “We have almost as many guns per head or per person here as in America. Back home in the United States, we also have a lot of guns, but the culture around guns is a little different.”

“The country of Switzerland proves that there's no need for more gun rules,” he asserts before parroting a narrative straight out of the gun-grabber playbook. “Guns are the number one cause of death among children in the United States, yet we don't have the will to stop it. Switzerland has the lowest crime rate in Europe.  That's all we have at this point, God and our guns.”

Sweeping Away a Web of Deceit

It would help if he didn’t automatically buy into prohibitionist propaganda, but by doing so he relieves us of the obligation to take him as an impartial and objective observer.

“Guns are not the leading cause of children’s deaths,” economist, author, and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, John Lott demonstrates. The problem, of course, is that the citizen disarmament lobby includes young adult urban gang members in its calculations to spook the herd into believing little Timmy and Susie in the suburbs are routinely blowing each other away because Dad left the Glock in his sock drawer.

Likewise, the opening assertion about “mass shootings” is subject to prohibitionist manipulation by ignoring the Justice Department definition as “any incident in which at least four people are murdered with a gun” and inflating the numbers as the self-named Gun Violence Archive does by counting “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed…” And in any case, as Lott again proves, “94% of mass public shootings occur in places where guns are banned.”

They also occur in known locales, Democrat urban areas for the most part.

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“Murders in United States are very concentrated: 2% of counties had 56% of the murders in 2020, 52% of US counties had zero murders,” Lott demonstrates in another paper. “Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas, and even in those counties, murders are concentrated in small areas inside them…”

An inconvenient truth that complete observers must tread carefully around at the risk of being accused of hateful motives is that Switzerland is a nation of nearly homogenous demographics, and similar results of peaceable populations can be demonstrated in the U.S to show that they can and do consistently coexist peaceably with guns. Case in point, as author and attorney David B. Kopel  noted in “Japanese Gun Control,” citing criminologist Gary Kleck’s award-winning research in Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, “Another indication that social standards matter more than gun laws is that Japanese-Americans, who have access to firearms, have a lower violent crime rate than do Japanese in Japan.”

And anecdotally, we can observe the absence of violent crimes attributable to the five million or so members of the NRA and other national and state groups, who are arguably the most heavily armed yet simultaneously peaceable civilian population on the planet, more than “competitive” with the Swiss experience. Contrary to the citizen disarmament meme promoted by Brady, Giffords, Everytown, and its Moms Demand gaggle of hysterical cat ladies, it’s NOT guns, but more of a reflection of populations negatively affected by a continuing history of destructive, racist government “equity” policies combined with “catch and release” protocols for chronic and habitual predatory sociopaths.

Culture Clash

This, in turn, leads to other realities about major differences between -- not “gun cultures” -- but cultures. And again, Switzerland and the U.S. are very different in terms of public attitudes, depending on prevailing regional politics.

The Swiss collectively celebrate their guns and think nothing of ranges (designed to prevent stray shots) that span across highways from the shooting house to the target. Here in the U.S., we’ve all heard stories of housing developments being built near ranges with indignant new homeowners then complaining about the noise and forcing closures.

In Switzerland, shooting is a family activity and children are brought into the culture with development appropriate safety and skill training. In the U.S., unless part of a traditional family that values gun ownership and use, the emphasis is on avoidance and ignorance, which only contribute to tragedy and resulting demands for gun owners to “lock up your safety.”

And in Switzerland, the population is generally enthusiastic and supportive of gun ownership, including for “weapons of war.” Here, half or more are Democrats and vote for politicians who want to ban all guns, not just semiautos with standard capacity magazines, and dictate where and how can be kept and borne, preferably not at all.

As for differences in “gun cultures,” if you’re talking about America, a fair question would be “which one?” There are “diverse” members new gun owners in 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 Democrat because of other priorities they deem more important, like abortion. Ditto there are sport shooters and hunters who exemplify the very definition of “Fudds,” such as propaganda Democrats posing as “Sportsmen and Sportswomen for Biden,” or Giffords’ equally politically deceptive “Gun Owners for Safety.”

Again, showing videographer Harris missed the barn, it’s not about which culture “loves guns more.” Because while there’s no shortage of admiration for craftsmanship, mechanics, and everything that can make elegant form, function, and design the stuff of “gun porn,” plenty of “gun control” enforcers share the same appreciation of hardware as do “civilian” collectors. But that’s not the point of the Second Amendment. To repeat a truism, it’s not about guns, it’s about freedom.

A Deliberately Sabotaged Militia

And even among these, the emphasis in “pro-gun” laws being passed, like “permitless carry,” and Second Amendment lawsuits being filed against gun bans and “sensitive areas, is on self-defense. While Switzerland is ultimately about preserving its historic militia system, and the freedom from foreign invasion that has (so far) assured, U.S. Second Amendment advocacy has, to a large part, ignored the first 13 words, and the militia clauses codified in the Constitution.

The government has deliberately ignored its enumerated responsibilities and created a National Guard system that, when combined with politically prioritized law enforcement, effectively embeds the standing army the Founders feared throughout the Republic. Firearms News has provided some of the all-too-rare warnings on how ignoring its core purpose makes the Second Amendment more vulnerable to infringements (Part 1 and Part 2). Additionally, many states have enacted bans on citizens training together to defend their communities, and a new national bill, the “Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act,” was introduced in January by perennial Democrat citizen disarmament zealots, Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Jamie Raskin.

The ‘Safety’ Dance

There’s one other assertion Harris makes, that “Switzerland proves that there's no need for more gun rules,” that shows he’s oblivious to developments there, and utterly influenced by a lie that he and the rest of the world have been bombarded with since the first infringements were “justified.”

They’re not about “public safety.” They’re about government establishing an unchallengeable monopoly of violence, or to put it bluntly, about an elite and unaccountable group establishing totalitarian controls. If that was not the case, with all the emphasis on how “crime-free” Switzerland is, what other justification could there be for Swiss voters in 2019 falling for propaganda from the elites to overwhelmingly approve aligning the nation’s gun laws with those of the European Union? (See “Swiss Once More Bowing to Hat of Foreign Tyrants” by searching this article on the  Firearms News website.)

And if there’s one thing U.S. and European experiences make clear for all to see – even “journalists,” if they choose to – is that those who would control take what they can get in increments. And rather than securing an objective and saying “enough,” with that conquest no longer demanding resources they can then focus on the next achievable goal in their long march to global citizen disarmament.

About the Author

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. In addition to being a regular featured contributor for Firearms News and AmmoLand Shooting Sports News, he blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and posts onTwitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.

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