[RyanMcGreal]

Some important points about Switzerland:

* Switzerland constitutes an organized state militia in which the government obligates its citizens to undergo military weapons training with annual reserve training until age 30.

* Citizens in the militia are required to possess and maintain weapons, but the use and storage of those weapons - and particularly their ammunition - is very tightly regulated (e.g. ammunition sold at a shooting range must be used there).

* Citizens who decide to keep their weapons after their reserve obligations are complete must have a licence.

* Citizens who want to purchase a gun must get a permit to do so. To get a permit, you must have a clean criminal record and pass a psychological screening. (Single shot rifles do not require a permit.)

* The sale of automatic and selective-fire weapons is forbidden. (It is possible to buy one with a special permit from the police.)

In short, Swiss gun laws are based on the idea that citizens may be called on to defend the country from attack; whereas American gun laws are based on the idea that citizens may have to defend themselves from their own government.

The rules that govern responsible gun ownership and use in Switzerland would never be accepted in the United States by 2nd Amendment maximalists or the politicians they have intimidated.

One more thing: despite the stricture of Swiss gun laws, Switzerland still has a firearms-related death rate - 3.84 per 100,000 - that is on the high end of liberal democracies; one-third the American rate and almost double the Canadian rate.

[adventured]

Your stats on Switzerland are very misleading.

You're listing gun deaths, but that is not gun deaths by crime / homicide. That counts suicides and accidents.

Why don't we start counting in this discussion, how many people drown or die by poor choices while driving cars, while we're at it? Why do I care how someone chooses to commit suicide either?

The rate for Switzerland for gun crime / deaths is extraordinarily low.

"Government statistics for the year 2010 records 40 homicides involving firearms, out of the 53 cases of homicide in 2010. The annual rate of homicide by any means per 100,000 population was 0.70, which is one of the lowest in the world. The annual rate of homicide by guns per 100,000 population was 0.52"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland

http://world.time.com/2012/12/20/the-swiss-difference-a-gun-...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1566715.stm

http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/switzerland.asp

Also, the origination of the 2nd amendment was for self defense against foreign invasion as well (and in fact it was for self defense period). It was not just directed at our own government. The assumption has never been that the US would be solely protected from foreign invasion by the military, that's a notion that began from the 1930s forward with the quantum leap in military hardware.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it stipulate that the 2nd amendment is for defending against the US Government.

The writings of the founding fathers back me up on that point. During the Civil War, soldiers from the north and south often brought their own weapons (to defend against a foreign aggressor), and that would apply just as well against the British in 1812.

[RyanMcGreal]

It's not misleading to point out that a country with more guns has more gun-related deaths. Indeed, it would be misleading not to point this out. A death is a death, and a preventable death is a preventable death.

Consider this: in the 1970s, Britain switched from coal-gas furnaces to natural gas, which has a much lower level of carbon monoxide. During the period when the country made the switch, the suicide rate dropped by a third and has remained lower ever since.

When people no longer had convenient access to carbon monoxide poisoning, a significant fraction of people who would otherwise have committed suicide did not do so. The conclusion is that a person's likelihood of going through with committing suicide is at least partially a function of how easy it is to do it.

In the United States, over half of all suicides are via firearms. Looked at differently, two-thirds of all gun deaths are suicides. (Less than a thousand Americans die annually due to accidental gunshots, but they are responsible for over 20,000 injuries a year.)

Not surprisingly, if you look at the distribution of deaths due to injury by firearm, the death rates are highest in states that have the highest rates of gun ownership. The relationship is straightforward: states with more guns per capita have more gun injuries and deaths per capita.

The ten highest states by firearm death rate are: D.C. Alaska, Louisians, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, Mississippi, New Mexico, Arkansas and Alabama. The ten lowest states are: Hawaii, Massachussetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maine and Iowa. (You could overlay a red-state blue-state electoral map over the same data and it would match almost perfectly.)

Looked at still differently, several recent studies have found that states with the weakest gun regulations have the highest rates of gun deaths by homicide, suicide, accidental deaths, deaths of children and so on, even when you control for the rate of household firearm ownership. That is, gun death rates are higher in states with weaker gun laws, independent of the level of gun ownership (though of course they also correlate).

Bottom line: if the United States had more of a Swiss approach to gun ownership, with its rigorous controls, restrictions and training requirements, its guns would kill far fewer people each year. But the very people most determined to own firearms are also most determined not to allow the government to exert the kind of regulation and oversight that would mitigate the risk.