Switzerland's best kept secret

What the recent referendum on gun ownership really means.

Emotive times in normally sedate Switzerland. This week, the Swiss voted in a referendum to toughen up gun ownership laws, whose chief proposal would have been to remove the army rifles of ex-soldiers from private homes. Since military service is compulsory for all men over 18, that's a lot of guns.
The debate stirred deep feelings and both sides churned them further. "A firearms monopoly for criminals? NO," intoned one pro-gun poster, over an illustration of a laughing thug brandishing a pistol. The reform poster simply showed a teddy bear slumped on its side from a gunshot wound. "Protect families," the caption pleaded. If that seems a little melodramatic, it is worth noting that Switzerland has one of the highest rates of civilian gun ownership in the world and the highest rate of firearm suicide in Europe.
This is chiefly a consequence of military service, after which most reservists store their weapons at home. Proponents of the reform argued that this accounted for the high rate of firearm suicide and domestic violence, and proposed that guns should be kept in arsenals, available when needed rather than on a whim.
We know about the number of small arms in Switzerland mainly because of the Swiss themselves. Geneva is home to the Small Arms Survey, a research project that produces public information on small arms and armed violence around the world. The organisation writes that "the proliferation of small arms and light weapons represents a grave threat to human security," which would suggest that Switzerland should rank somewhat higher on the instability scale. Yet the correlation is uncertain.
In 2007, the Small Arms Survey tried to count the number of civilian firearms in countries around the world, ranking countries by their average number of firearms per hundred people. At the very top of the list, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the United States, averaging 88.8 firearms per hundred people. Switzerland was next, with 54.8. Also in the top ten were Finland and Sweden - not nations noted for their volatility. (Admittedly, Iraq and Yemen also made the top ten, so a mixed bag.)
Indeed, with the top 25 dominated by Western European countries and other safe, stable nations such as New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates (and East Timor, a small country that regularly experiences gun violence, at the bottom of the list with 0.3 firearms per hundred) the data seem to indicate that more weapons per person leads to more stability.
That's the tongue-in-cheek way of putting it. In fact, it's more complicated than simply the number of small arms per person - one of the reasons for high levels of gun ownership in European countries is down to hunting clubs.
In Switzerland, gun clubs are a popular pastime and are part of the culture of village life in parts of the country.
The United States, which tops the list and has more than 40 per cent of all the small arms in the world, is very stable (although its citizens do frequently kill each other with guns). The UAE and Lebanon have almost the same number of firearms per hundred people, yet their stability is very different. Owning a gun and having cause to use it are quite different things.
In the end, the Swiss said no to the change, with 56.3 per cent voting against it.
What does this mean for Switzerland, now that the law has failed to pass? Maybe nothing - technically a change in the law would not have reduced the number of guns per person, only their location. But maybe the Swiss will feel they have dodged a bullet after almost losing their beloved weapons - and, like the teddy bear, hug them even closer.