“Switzerland is different,” Dora Andres, president of Switzerland’s sport shooting association, told the AP. “In many countries the government doesn’t trust its citizens and feels it has to protect them. In Switzerland, because we have a system of popular referendums, the state has to have faith in its citizens.”
Markus Mueller, a spokesman for a group of current and retired Swiss military officers, told the AP before the vote that the “real purpose of this initiative is to weaken the militia army and withdraw the state’s confidence in its citizens,” adding that “only a disarmed people can be oppressed. That’s why we’re against this.”
While news of the common-sense vote by the Swiss people attracted little attention from news sources or Second Amendment groups in the U.S., at least one writer in Canada applauded the vote. Noting that Swiss gun control advocates had trotted out the same arguments that have been successfully used to pass tighter gun laws in Canada and elsewhere, Lorne Gunter of the National Post wrote of Switzerland, “It’s good to know that there remains a modern, sophisticated democracy that has not given in to the irrational, fearful, anti-factual, gun-ban mentality. Trusting ordinary, law-abiding citizens with guns is a sign of a free country, one in which the people are truly the sovereigns and not the subjects of the government.”
