Johnny Harris, a journalist and a Youtuber, shared his experiences of Switzerland and tries to give reasons why Swiss people love their guns more than Americans.
By Laura King
I’m in Switzerland, and there’s a big festival going on. Everyone has the day off. They’re all gathering to have a good time to celebrate guns. It’s a shooting competition for teenagers, and they’ve been doing this for hundreds of years. It used to just be boys, but now it’s boys and girls, and the winner is deemed the king or queen of shooting.
Switzerland is a peaceful, neutral country, and yet it is full of guns. The government gives its citizens guns and trains them how to shoot. Every village is required to have access to a shooting range. 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 right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The country of Switzerland proves that there’s no need for more gun rules. 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. I really want to get to the bottom of this gun culture thing, why these two countries have such vastly different relationships with guns.
So I delved deeper than I usually delve and found myself digging through old literature from Scottish political philosophers and looking into the constitutional archives, talking to Second Amendment experts, talking to military historians from Switzerland and it’s finally all clicked for me and I want to share that with you. So buckle up for what is going to be a wild ride through history and an adventure through Switzerland.
So as a side note to this story, I’ve been finding a lot of bunkers in Switzerland, which if you all remember, a year ago from right now, I published a video about all of the bunkers hiding in Switzerland. And now that I’m here again, I find myself stumbling upon more and more bunkers.
I’m in beautiful Switzerland, shooting guns and learning a lot about firearms. There’s the shooting range and the targets are on this side. Oh yeah, there’s the target. Oh, I hear them. Holy smoke. So they’re literally shooting over the road right there. Oh God, those people. Geez, there are bullets flying over our heads right now. Oh my God. That is such a weird feeling.
Headed to a shooting competition right now at this shooting range surrounded by beautiful Swiss mountains. The sound of these guns. My god, it’s like a war zone. Oh wow. But this, but it’s only six rounds.
Because it’s single loaded so you always have to. You always have to cock it, yeah. Then you can make it wider and smaller. Yeah. And you can even. As I’m standing here, you realize like the cars are right there.
You could easily shoot them if you wanted to, if you were standing up. Like I knew that this existed. I saw the Tom Scott video a few months ago. I thought it was like there was one crazy shooting range in Switzerland that goes over a road. I didn’t realize it was common.
It’s a friendly competition. It’s all very wholesome. You see these young kids that are like keeping score, tabulating all of the results. I’ve been hanging out with the president of one of these shooting clubs trying to understand a little bit better about what this event and things like this represent for these communities.
The military law tells all the villages that they need to provide a shooting range or a possibility to shoot. We got the ammo, which the military provided at a discount. Just try again. So you’re right-handed? Yep, I’m right-handed. Is there a telescope in there?
Like how am I seeing that far down? No, there’s no telescope. There’s no telescope. Oh, that’s what makes it. You’re not allowed to use any sights, any optics at any competitions in Switzerland. Okay, so you’re gonna make sure I don’t hit any of these cars.
Yeah. Now you’re not able to see any cars anymore? Nope, no more cars. Okay, so no more cars. No more problems about that? Yes. Maybe, yeah, move a little bit further, yeah.
You’re ready? Yeah, I think I’m ready. Whoa. Now it’s loaded. It’s ready to shoot. Oh my God. Okay. Target 19. Target 19. Here we go. Very slow. Now you pulled all the way through. Oh, I did. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yes, I forgot about that. That’s why normally we train how that works. But you hit the target. I hit the target, that’s good. Okay.
You can actually hit the target. That’s good. Oh, there we go. Now we saw it. I’m getting better. As I shot in my first gun competition, I was surprised that my instructor kept telling me to relax, to breathe, to turn inward. Exactly. Yeah, that felt way more relaxed. Now hit the 10. Oh, there we go. Here we go. Wow.
I turned inward, relaxed, and I hit the 10. Sharpshooter over here. Wow. This is addictive. I definitely see, I’m like, I could do this all day. So this is like relaxing or calming down for me. Sometimes I feel like I’m going into another world. You turn your focus from focusing outside, you’re focusing inside. Wow. This is fun. Objectively, this is just fun.
And it’s beautiful. I like looking at the Swiss countryside. It’s great. My experience with guns as a kid, I would go out into the forest and blow up like glass bottles with shotguns. That’s what I think America is all about. Wow, that was awesome. I kind of wanna shoot again.
I never thought I’d say this. I’m not a gun person, but I’m like, I kind of want to shoot more. Like, this is so fun. I was struck by how peaceful and celebratory and wholesome this all was. So much different than the way guns are presented in the USA.
So how did we get here? The story of Switzerland starts here. Well, actually down there at that lake in a little green valley where a group of people came together and made a promise to each other 700 years ago.
And with that promise came a myth. The hero’s name was William Tell and legend has it that one day he refused to bow down to the king’s local leader. It was a daring act of disrespect. So as punishment, the overlord forced him to shoot an apple off his own son’s head. Tell aimed his crossbow carefully and released it. He made the perfect shot. He continued to defy the ruler and eventually inspired the tribes in this region to launch a rebellion.
Tell eventually shot the ruler dead and the rebels would go on to win their independence, banding together to start the Confederacy that would become Switzerland. They first made an agreement that they would protect one another, but instead of forming a full-time standing army run by a king, they would arm and train ordinary people to fight.
So not an army at all, but rather a militia. I’m now going into a shooting range that is in the mountain in a dugout bunker. Very Swiss. It feels like the old bunker days, exploring a bunker but I am in a shooting range. Mind-blowingly big.
It’s like a maze in the mountains with just a bunch of rooms shooting. Okay, so now I’m fully loaded. Safety off. I’m gonna take safety off. Yeah, if you are on the target. If you are on the target and you wanna shoot, you can take the safety off. Okay. Shooting in the bunker is a completely different experience.
Like you feel the vibration of your entire body ’cause the echo is so extreme. I’m getting better at shooting. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh yeah. You never shot before, right? No. Two days ago, I started. So back to 1600s Europe, where Switzerland remained this one peaceful confederacy protected by its citizen militia.
Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe, greedy kings were using their huge standing armies to conquer one another while Switzerland stood by training its citizens in the ways of war. Swiss citizens got so good at fighting that the Pope hired them as his personal protectors. Other empires would even hire Swiss soldiers to fight their own wars.
But Switzerland itself remained almost entirely out of these conflicts on the continent. Eventually, European thinkers started to notice this peculiar Alpine Confederacy, Switzerland, this place that trains their citizens to fight and miraculously showed that you can have a republic even in Europe, a sea of monarchy and kings.
I’ve been reading a lot of old European political literature and you start to see this phrase pop up to describe how Switzerland defends itself using a well-regulated militia. I saw this term a lot when I was looking through this old literature.
Around 1610, this British diplomat goes to Switzerland and gawks at their well-regulated militia, how they can overturn their government at pleasure because they all know how to fight.
By the way, back in like the 1600s well-regulated militia meant like a well-organized or efficiently run militia, not like regulated in the way that we think of it today, but yeah, the idea was if you arm everyone in your society and you train them, that’s actually the key to the best defense and the best preservation of freedom for the people, not just the king.
This idea of a well-regulated militia spread across the ocean to a group of British intellectuals who were secretly conspiring to overthrow their own king.
In 1776, they declared independence using their own well-regulated militia to fight off a tyrannical king and his standing army. As they fought this war, a leader from Switzerland wrote to Benjamin Franklin suggesting that this new rebel experiment called the United States should become Sister Republics with Switzerland.
The Americans somehow won this war and got to work designing their new country. They sat down in a hot church looking building to draft the document that would be the foundation of this experiment. A system free of kings. The founders studied the political systems of Greece and Rome. They studied the British Magna Carta, Native American confederacies, European philosophers. But then there’s John Adams, one of the founders who was kind of obsessed with Switzerland at this time.
He studied their system and he was amazed at how their militia worked, how they required everyone to have a gun and to have ammo and they wouldn’t let them get married unless they did. He wrote all about this in like a treatise on different government systems right before he wrote the Constitution with his fellow co-founders. Switzerland was a model. It was the republic that had resisted tyranny and been able to stay free in a Europe full of kings.
And when it came time to write the actual constitution, you can see that a militia was enshrined in the Constitution itself. In the Constitution, the role of the militia is to protect the government, to protect the country from invasion or insurrection.
And then after the Constitution, it became time to draft that sacred list of the most fundamental rights that would ensure that the American project remained free and full of liberty.
The first of these 10 amendments would be freedom of speech and of expression, assembly, religion, and the press. But right after that, they write the Second Amendment and it’s about the well-regulated militia being vital, being necessary for the security of a free country.
So to have a militia, the people must have arms. They must have a right to have guns. So now you have the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Second Amendment and then a few years later, the well-regulated militia idea got enshrined in law when one of the first congresses passed a law that said that every man doesn’t just have the right to have a gun, but is required to have a gun and ammo and must train to use it so that the president could call on its armed citizens as its mechanism for defense.
This whole legal framework was very clearly like, yes, you can have guns, but only if you are ready to use them to defend our country from invasion or insurrection. And sure enough, George Washington had to actually use this.
There was this rebellion in Pennsylvania over taxes, and George Washington called up his armed citizens to march and clamp down on these rebels and it totally worked. The militia system was working for this young nation to ensure its freedoms with an armed citizenry, something Switzerland had been doing for centuries.
Guns started out as a symbol of collective security, as collective defense, armed citizens ready to stand up to defend the country. But needless to say, things kind of changed when it came to guns in America. So how we got from that to this is the next part of this video.
And in my mind, it’s the most interesting version of this story because it shows us how Switzerland and the United States diverged so severely from this militia culture. Okay, but before we get to that, I want to show you more about Switzerland today.
Show you what it looks like when a country sticks to an actual militia system as their primary tool for national defense. Okay. To better understand gun ownership in Switzerland, I visited a member of the Swiss Army. Hey, how are you doing? Nice to meet you. Hey, can I see your gun? Of course.
That’s why you came. That’s why I’m here. You want to play some Where’s Waldo? Where’s the assault rifle? Oh my gosh, I already see it. You used to have a gun in your corner here. You wanna carry it? Okay. What’s interesting to me is like for you, this is like no big deal, for me, this is a giant gun. Like this, I don’t handle guns. Like I held a gun like this for the first time like two days ago, for the very first time in my life.
No way. Yes, actually I’m an American. Switzerland still has a militia. Every able-bodied man in Switzerland is given a uniform and a gun and required to join the military. And this is in the constitution.
It’s written there that every male can be forced, not only forced to do military service, but also forced to make more. So instead of 21 weeks, I did 37 weeks and in total, I have to do like 450 days. Up until the nineties, you would go to jail if you refused to do this. Now you just have to pay 3% of your income if you don’t, I was also very against the military and I went reluctantly.
One of the first things you do in this initial training is you come to one of these clubs and you learn to shoot. It was kind of scary actually, because it’s all like 18 to 20-year-old guys and just like, oh yeah, we’re gonna go to shoot this gun now. And it’s like, here’s ammunition, here’s the rounds and now you do what you learned.
After the recruits complete their training, they return back to their normal jobs, to their normal lives, but they keep their firearm with them in their home. And then they’re required to come to one of these private clubs every year to practice shooting. It’s called the obligatories.
So it’s obligatory or mandatory for people to shoot. This is my shooting book. You know, every time I shoot, there is like a little report, somebody has to sign it. Of course when you go shooting, you just take this out and then it’s just like this. Wow. And you go to the public transport just like that.
You’re just walking around on the train with your guns. Yeah. Really? So it’s actually similar to what the United States National Defense Strategy looked like in the 1800s where every able-bodied man had a gun and was required to use it, required to be ready to defend the country from invasion or insurrection.
Part of this is also being able to fight if it will be necessary just to, you know, protect our country. And this, you know, self-defense thinking is part of, you know, our people from Switzerland. What Switzerland doesn’t have that we have in the United States is a Second amendment, an articulated, unambiguous right to have guns. Instead, guns are articulated mostly
as a duty to protect the country. And then secondly comes the privilege to use guns, to compete with them, to own guns, et cetera. For them, the duty came first. We have a tradition, more of a liberty tradition, and there it’s more of a responsibility tradition. Essentially, everybody has to go. So this is kind of like one thing that unifies a lot of the male population here.
And it’s just like you can meet a guy and if he has done military service as well, you can talk for hours and hours and hours. And this to me, makes all the difference, like these two different purposes of guns in society, whether they are a right for individuals or the duty of the collective. I think this is a major factor that divides these two gun cultures.
If you could describe Swiss shooting culture in three words, what would those words be? And this is where it all clicked for me.
I had thought that Switzerland’s gun culture was the product of smart laws and gun policies. But being here, it was becoming clear that it was the militia system that was at the root of all of this. The requirement for every man to learn how to shoot is the main strategy for collective national defense, turning guns into a symbol of community and celebration.
The center of large festivals all over the country, where Swiss traditions are celebrated with firearms at the center, like that teen shooting competition in Zurich, or this important shooting festival that takes place at the foot of the Alps along a beautiful Swiss lake.
The place where the founders of Switzerland formed their confederacy in 1291. You have so many members of the community coming out and participating in them. You’re gonna have fun. The shooting is fun.
They’ll have music. After you’re done shooting, you can have some beer or wine and it’s a family affair and so they kept that alive. Okay, we’re at yet another gun club, and once again, this gun club has a target that goes right over the top of a highway. I’m here to continue to learn what the deal is with Swiss gun culture and to see if I can get a better score than I did last time.
Okay, so this is the gun we’re shooting today. Gonna give it a go here. Oh, there’s a kick. There’s a kick on this one. Okay, here it goes. Wow. Geez. Okay, man, the sound echoes through the valley. Okay.
Beginner’s luck continues. Wow. Oh, here comes the score. My scorecard. Okay, what do we have here? It’s beginner’s luck. Beginner’s luck. This is my scorecard here. My moosh, what’s it called? Moosh. Moosh.
I got the moosh. Yes, so 300 meters away. I think that this bullet just traveled across the valley over the cars and hit a thing that’s this big is pretty satisfying. So while I’m sitting here shooting bullseyes right below us, not only are other cars, but there’s a guy just mowing the lawn. Like there’s a guy mowing the lawn right there under the shooting range. This place is at once super buttoned up when it comes to guns and seemingly very relaxed, but it’s not relaxed.
As I visit these gun clubs, it’s striking how much these feel like a magnet for community, a gathering place for the community, a collective activity and competition that everyone in the community can enjoy. I’m so used to guns being associated with danger and division and politics and fear, but here it just has such a different feel than what I’m used to. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. This is really good. It’s been a really enlightening experience visiting all these shooting ranges.
And what it’s taught me is that guns here in Switzerland are a totally different thing than they are in America. Like they’re a completely different symbol. They have a very different purpose. They have a very different meaning. And that’s kind of surprising to me because remember that the United States was founded on a lot of the same paradigms as Switzerland when it came to having a militia and having firearms in society as a form of collective defense.
So to understand how these two gun cultures so greatly diverged despite having similar roots, you have to understand what happens after the Constitution, after the Second Amendment. I have the right to protect my family and myself. What do you think about American gun culture?
Like what’s the view? The fact that everybody has a gun in America. It would make me feel uneasy. And I’m used to being in the proximity of guns because I’m allowed a gun.
I don’t know how you guys do it. And if he tries to take our guns, he can take them from our cold, dead hands. There has been a shooting at a synagogue. Get off of my porch right now.
Gun control, all it’s gonna do is take the guns out of the people that obey the law. Three people were killed in Jacksonville, Florida today after what appears to be a racially motivated hate crime. So after its independence, the US quickly learned that while a militia is great for defense, deterrence and neutrality, it is not good for one thing, conquest.
Beginning in the 19th century, the US expanded west very quickly. They fought other European colonists and Native Americans for their land. They would eventually fight each other in a civil war. These kinds of operations were too big for militias made up of everyday citizens. Instead, they needed to establish and fund a centralized, professional standing army.
And this was just the beginning. By the time the 1900s rolled around, the US had grown into something that Switzerland never was and probably never will be, an expansionist empire using its sprawling permanent military to wield influence around the globe. By the middle of the century, it would become the largest and most powerful military to have ever existed.
Because the US had a huge standing army, it did away with a lot of the original laws requiring people to join the militia. And now without a duty to form a militia to protect the country from invasion and insurrection like the Constitution said, they were left with just the second half of this amendment, the right to bear arms and how it should not be infringed.
Guns started to become more of a personal tool, a tool to pursue their American dream, to hunt, to protect their family, to exterminate. It’s more like the Rambo style. It’s not like I’m going shooting at the target.
You don’t go shooting somewhere in the woods or in the forest, you just don’t do that. You go to a shooting range and you get part of the community and then your goal is not just to, you know, shoot wherever there is.
So your goal is to get better. And your goal is not just to shoot around. Guns continued to take on a more personal symbol in the sixties and seventies when more and more Americans were losing trust in their government.
This was also right at the time when crime was skyrocketing in America. Without this duty for collective defense, guns became more and more a symbol of personal defense from all of this crime, personal liberty and a symbol of this growing anti-government sentiment.
And as a result, the number of guns in America soared. The NRA, which remember after the Civil War started as a largely non-political group that was meant to just help Americans be more responsible and better marksmen, they got taken over in the seventies by a group of hardliners who wanted to change the agenda of the NRA, turning into a political lobbying group that was set on reshaping the way Americans thought about the Second Amendment and making sure that no legislation ever made it through that curtailed gun rights.
They began pushing an interpretation of the Second Amendment that was about individual protection, a right to bear arms so that you can protect yourself. And trying to de-emphasize the connection to a well-regulated militia as the purpose for this right to bear arms.
In the face of this relentless onslaught of gun control schemes, you’re the reason the Second Amendment still stands. You’re the tip of the spear. You’re the ones that make it possible for us every day to defend this freedom.
And it totally worked. The Second Amendment became more and more a guarantee that everyone can have guns to protect themselves and their family having nothing to do with protecting the country. After all, we had the biggest military in the world. We didn’t need a militia anymore.
This interpretation of guns and the Second Amendment would become solidified in a five to four vote in the Supreme Court in 2008 when the court ruled that the Second Amendment guaranteed people to have guns, even when those guns have no relationship to an armed militia.
So this is why the United States has more guns than any country on Earth because the courts have ruled that guns are an individual right, a right to bear arms.
Every year, 20,000 murders occur with a gun. Thousands of children and teens are killed with a gun. Hundreds of deaths are caused by gun accidents, hundreds of mass shootings and of course, the leading cause of gun violence, suicides.
Tens of thousands of lives taken with guns but we can’t seem to do much about it because as long as guns remain an individual right now deeply woven into American identity, any effort to try to pass reasonable laws, to try to limit these countless deaths that we have in our country will continue to fail especially as the NRA continues to politicize guns, to use them to divide America, to scare America, and to make us feel like we need guns to be safe.
The facts are on our side. Guns save lives. And you’ll never stop us from defending our families. My last visit was an important one to this gun shop where the owner is Swiss, but is a card carrying member of the NRA and a big fan of American Gun Culture. I had to get his take on this. These are the best assault rifles in the world.
Really? These are, yes. Wow. What makes them so good? Why are they so good? They’re Swiss made. Any questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. You don’t need to say anymore. What do you feel when you look at American gun culture?
It’s very interesting. From the gun system, from the gun laws, I would like to live in the States but not with all the dumbasses around. I don’t know why there are so many deaths, accidents with firearms and here, nothing. I don’t know why. Why are all the US Citizens so stupid and let a loaded firearm there on the table with kids 1, 2, 3 years old. I don’t know why.
You need some rules. Our government, they support shooting clubs. They do support ammo. They support shooting ranges. They support the guys who are going to a shooting range.
You need rules. You need to have it. Yeah. So here’s my conclusion in all of this. I went into this story thinking that I was gonna tell a policy story like how different policies would affect gun culture and it totally took a different route because I learned sort of halfway through that guns are a symbol.
They’re a symbol. Yes, they’re a weapon. Yes, they’re a sports tool, but they’re also a symbol for the people who wield them. The way we see guns is deeply influenced by the stories and the myths of our societies.
Switzerland and the United States have two very different stories and because of that, they have two very different gun cultures. For Switzerland, having armed citizens who are trained with weapons is what kept them neutral and safe as a group, as a collective.
The United States admired this and tried to copy it and they did for a while but soon the demands of an expanding empire allowed that vision to fade and turned the meaning of guns into something different, making it a right for individuals to protect themselves. Most guns in America are not used to protect people. That’s not what they’re used for. They’re often used at a shooting range or hunting or to end someone’s life.
And yet to the people who hold fast to their firearms as a right, they feel like any change to that, any legislation to change or to limit those guns is a taking away of their right.
So the way I see it, as long as guns are an individual right, associated with personal protection and personal liberty, not a lot’s gonna change in America. We certainly don’t stand a chance of having a culture, anything like what we’ve seen here in Switzerland. And that’s a shame to me. That’s a shame.
