Why is gun violence lower in Switzerland than in the US?
It's weird because Switzerland is one of the most armed countries in Europe, as in they have firearms but barely any shootings of any kind (so you don't often hear news equivalent to a guy shooting students in a classroom or killing people at a shopping mall over there). Part of it has to do with the draft (most people who purchase firearms have a form of training, as they learnt how to properly handle them during military service).
67 replies
Socio-economic sanity.
It's a bunch of reasons, but the one that we can actually do something about is the social democratic safety nets. We have way fewer in the US and that causes rampant anxiety, which leads to violence. Switzerland's population isn't on the brink of snapping, so they tend not to shoot each other.
You got part of it. The Swiss get formal training during their military service, and understand that owning a gun is a responsibility and an obligation, not a right. They have a sense of duty around their ownership.
But another big part is that nobody on the planet fetishizes guns like the US. Guns are a symbol of virility, of sexual prowess, of "American Freedom." Facebook recently showed me a reel by a woman who poses (nude) on OnlyFans with guns and motorcycles. That is a profoundly US mindset. (And of course the guns are assault rifles.)
Only in the US and a few other pockets of rednecks are guns fetishized.
You missed the countries those rednecks ironically hate, because they share so much. They both want to impose their version of religious law, both fetishize guns, both hate women, and both have some serious problems with closeted POS.
switzerland has mandatory military service, a small population, and is higher per capita wealth. their quality of life is among the highest in the world and swiss gun culture is very responsible and chill.
USA is the opposite of most of that.
Im going to guess there are fewer desperate, discarded, angry people in Switzerland.
Yeah, guns are the tools and not the root cause. Significant income disparity, racism, social pressures, and a ton of other triggers cause murders and suicides and while guns enable them there still needs to be something that causes someone to use the guns in that way.
Violent crime that doesn't involve guns in the US is significantly higher than other western countries.
Same with hard drugs, and the associated crime... they're a symptom, not the root cause. Hard drugs are used to escape reality. If there's fewer reasons to escape, usage drops dramatically.
My mom (if she were still here) would say it's from Reagan taking money out of mental health.
My mom would say it's from the fall of man and America turning away from God. Your mom seems smarter than mine.
Your mom seems like the reason why there are so many mass shootings in the USA
The "your mom" jokes are getting really cryptic. I'm completely OOTL.
It always seems to go back to Reagan.
she's on to something there.
"Most armed country in Europe" is still a pretty different category from the level of gun ownership in the US and they have CONSIDERABLY higher standards for background checking and permits than the US. The US is one of the only country on earth that just lets some random walk into a store and walk out with a firearm.
False. 4473.
Education
People in Switzerland have a bit of discipline, common sense and a baseline of education. There are also rules what kind of weapons you’re are allowed to have: you CANNOT get a subwoofer AK573-ultra assault rifeletta with powerbooster that shoots 263 253mm bullits per second. For your toddler.
That, and also likely better mental healthcare, less laws that would cause situations where someone can be pushed over the edge, etc...
That and a magnum 53, a box of handgrenades and an ice cream as welcome gift. And a bonus card.
I would assume better social safety nets, less income disparity, and less economic and social stress on their less well off members of society. Pretty sure their society doesn't idolize criminals and antisocial people either.
Crazy what Nazi gold will buy you
According to a quick check on Wikipedia Switzerland has 27.6 firearms per 100 people, so in average you can expect 1 in 4 people to be armed. While the USA has 1.205 weapons per person, so you can expect in average that 1 in 5 people has an extra weapon besides the one 100% of the population does.
I think the 436% increase in weapon per capita might contribute to an increase with gun violence, but that's just my guess.
I think that should be 1.205 guns per person, or 120.5 guns per hundred people. I know we have some people with massive collections, but I've never met someone with literally 10s of thousands of guns. Also the people that own a few hundred are skewing the statistics. We aren't actually all armed.
You're correct, in one my edits before submitting I must have erased the 100 there and forgot to move the decimal place, thanks for pointing it out (I've edited my post). The rest of the math was done considering the correct number, i.e. 1.2 weapon per person, it was just a wording mistake.
120.5/100 == 1.205, it's the exact same number expressed differently. However, 1.205 implies that everyone has at least one firearm, which is not true. 120.5/100 implies that if you go to 100 random people and count all their guns together, you'll end up around 120 guns on average.
Sure, but they wrote 120.5 guns per person, and I don't think we have a stockpile that amounts to 48,000,000,000 weapons. I could believe there are 480,000,000 privately owned weapons in the US, hence my correction/confusion.
Because guns don't cause gun violence; poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, and mental health issues cause gun violence.
Switzerland's society and government place value on treating the underlying causes of gun violence. The US's government has been captured by corporations who derive profit from the incarceration of people who commit gun violence.
Can't gun violence without guns. If we can't fix one component we need to fix the other.
Because they have a better culture than the US does.
Probably Switzerland has less morons
stannis_fewer.picx
I want to use the word 'less', so I'll change it to "less moronicism"
I think it's a combination of factors but the largest (in my mind at least) is the capitalist fed toxically-independent mindset that has thrived in the US. It keeps people afraid of other people. It keeps them isolated which prevents community and safety and trust. It sows xenophobia. It prevents any preference toward a government collective.
Take a look at the difference between US towns and towns anywhere else in the world. Suburbs are extremely rural in comparison. They're re devoid of life. Life only exists in the little boxes. In Europe a town of 300 is built around an active town center and rural properties are all focused on that center. US suburbs are less connected than rural Europe or Asia. And then much of the US is way more rural than the suburbs. You've got a media and political system telling everyone they're alone and on their own. So when people have a psychotic break (not super uncommon) or just some form of extreme emotion, they do so with the fear of others in mind. And they lash out with one thing that makes them feel powerful in their solitude.
the vast majority of americans live in cities dude. only 20% of the population is rural.
Society is extremely different. They are sensible people there..
Difficult to shoot that guy you don't like when there's a mountain in the way
Can't find a link but I watched a video on this recently. Some dude came over and visited the rifle ranges where they shoot over the cars on the highway and they talked a lot about gun culture as well.
I got you
https://youtu.be/2h1s6S4kotE
It's almost like gun violence is a symptom of larger sociological issues....
I'm convinced that Americans are just inherently more violent/aggressive when compared to the citizens of any other developed nation.
Even without guns, their murder and violence rates surpass the UK/Aus/NZ/Canada (so all the anglo-nations) and all of Western, Northern and most of Central and Eastern Europe.
it's because our society is designed around the appeasement of the rich, instead of the common people. More people are living in poverty, in toxic conditions, or are outright homeless. This has been going on for generations now, of people living with nothing. When you have a gun, and can force people to give you what you want, the threat of prison isn't a great deterrent when it's literally better than your current living situation. Desperate hungry people do desperate things.
americans love violence, yes.
The question is, why.
because it's taught.
Perhaps the Swiss have better social safety nets? The U.S. loves the idea that you can lift yourself by your own bootstraps (you can't), and loves rugged individualism (you are alone). If an individual falls -- or feels like they've fallen -- there's not much help. There's guns, though.
The difference isn't culture it's gun laws and regulations. Gun control works.
common sense
Because theyre playing the same game except Switzerland is playing against 9 million people while the US is playing against 300 million people.
If you're trying to imply it's because they're smaller you're still wrong. Switzerland has 12 deaths per 100,000 people where the US has 15,186 per 100,000.same measure, dramatically different amounts.
It's gonna be education, training, and respect for firearms.
And fewer poor people. And regulations.
Who's doing the shootings in the US?
14-24 year old impoverished young men forced to live in urban hellscapes with no legitimate opportunity for economic advancement comprise the bulk of both murderer and murdered.
It's almost like systematically forcing people into desperation results in profound violence.
But yes, we should try to reduce the bulk of the violence by focusing all our attention on those rare and newsworthy cases where a privileged maniac adds a handful of privileged victims to the massive tally of systemically impoverished victims.
Yes! This narrows the original question down to addressing some very tangible and specific problems
Indeed. Systemic problems need systemic solutions.
Home Ownership is the single largest factor affecting poverty rates. We need to drive everyone toward home ownership rather than renting. Renting should only be feasible for small-time landlords who live on one unit of a duplex, triplex, or quadplex. Apartment buildings should be converted to condominiums. Land Contracts (basically rental agreements with fixed monthly rates that automatically convert to mortgages after three years) should replace traditional rental agreements with their annual rent hikes. All that is easily achievable by offering owner-occupant credits to property taxes, then jacking up the tax rate on investment properties beyond a rate where renting could be profitable. With renting generally infeasible, landlords will be pushing tenants to become buyers instead, mostly through tenant-favoring land contracts instead of landlord-favoring rental agreements.
We desperately need universal healthcare replacing our employer-sponsored healthcare standard, including optometry and dental coverage.
Prison reformation: Prisoners need to earn at least minimum wage for their labor. Their spending can be restricted while in prison, and their saved wages released as a monthly or weekly allowance after their release, but their labor needs to lead to economic gains, or we are just creating recidivism.
Universal Basic Income needs to be phased in. We can start with $20/wk for every man, woman, and child in the country, and increase it periodically.
Mostly white christian males
Wrong answer but you are playing to the crowd and I appreciate that
Most of the indiscriminate terrorist style mass shootings are white christian males, age 18-35, the majority of the criminal activity related (eg drug sales) is from black men age 18-30. Most of the gun deaths are from suicide, which is largely white men, but still high for black men.
Most preventable child deaths in the US are from guns, however the vast majority from accidental gun discharge, not violence.
Yeah none of that really rebutes what I said
It wasn't supposed to
I'm just going to repost my comment above because I think you should read it too and might not see it otherwise:
"Good faith" here is saying that there is no correlation between institutional racism and gun violence? That the socioethnic group that's specifically been calling out for years about about the lack of effective policing and community investment is just... making it up?
Did you actually think I was here to make some "muh fbi statistics" point and dip?
The point that I was trying to make is that there is one minority group that commits the majority of gun violence in the US, which is young, black, opportunity-deprived black men. The biggest victim of gun violence is black men. The biggest perpetrator of gun violence is black men. The most common form of gun violence is black man on black man. The reasons for why gun violence is so prevalent have been well understood for decades at this point and are the legacies of segregation, white flight, and contemporary institutional racism. Acting like these aren't connected, that gun violence is something that happens at random with no correlation to social power structures, and that, as a result, black men aren't the specified victims of it (as both immediate victim and victim of circumstances (re: attacker)), accomplishes nothing and ensures that more black men will die, disproportionately, every day because you're too scared to identify an uncomfortable correlation.
Over 60% of gun deaths in the US are suicides. Of the shooting deaths remaining, the overwhelming majority are committed by police. The overwhelming majority of "mass shootings" that are counted in statistics are committed by police.
But I can tell you're not here to participate in good faith discussion; you just want to hear strangers on the internet say what you think.
"Good faith" here is saying that there is no correlation between institutional racism and gun violence? That the socioethnic group that's specifically been calling out for years about about the lack of effective policing and community investment is just... making it up?
Did you actually think I was here to make some "muh fbi statistics" point and dip?
The point that I was trying to make is that there is one minority group that commits the majority of gun violence in the US, which is young, black, opportunity-deprived black men. The biggest victim of gun violence is black men. The biggest perpetrator of gun violence is black men. The most common form of gun violence is black man on black man. The reasons for why gun violence is so prevalent have been well understood for decades at this point and are the legacies of segregation, white flight, and contemporary institutional racism. Acting like these aren't connected, that gun violence is something that happens at random with no correlation to social power structures, and that, as a result, black men aren't the specified victims of it (as both immediate victim and victim of circumstances (re: attacker)), accomplishes nothing and ensures that more black men will die, disproportionately, every day because you're too scared to identify an uncomfortable correlation.
Pigs
The Swiss, obviously
Toddlers that grab carelessly left guns and play with them I think