Switzerland does not prove the NRA’s case

“PRO Deo et Patria”, “For God and Country”, is painted over the entrance of the Arquebuse shooting club. Members arrive clutching ear-protectors. A few carry backpacks with rifle barrels poking out. Gunfire echoes from the building, as pistols are fired on 25-metre and 50-metre ranges. Those with rifles pick out targets 300 metres away.

Since 1474 Geneva’s male residents, obliged to defend the city, have met for regular weapons practice here. Jacques Vo-Thanh, smoking outside after training, says guns are “embedded in the social life”. Though membership has declined, he estimates the club has 500 regulars and 2,000 retired members. Children as young as ten may learn to shoot. The government subsidises ammunition.

Pro-gun types in America have long pointed to Switzerland as a country with supposedly lax rules, widespread ownership of arms, proud hunting and shooting cultures and few resulting criminal problems. As of late last century some 40% of Swiss households had a weapon, usually a military-issue rifle or pistol in a cupboard. Almost all men, having been conscripts, were familiar with small arms. They kept weapons at home because they had to refresh their shooting skills each year.

Yet Switzerland is not a gun-lover’s paradise. In fact, it is a model for the benefits of restricting gun use. Ownership rates have tumbled in this century, especially after the army cut the number of conscripts by four-fifths. It now puts recruits through psychological checks to weed out the violent, depressive or criminal. Soldiers may still store weapons at home, but no longer with ammunition. On leaving the army, ex-soldiers must be cleared by police before buying their military-issue weapons. As a result, fewer do so. Civilian buyers need police permits too, while juries screen applicants at shooting clubs. “It is a bit state and a bit social responsibility. It works very well,” says Mr Vo-Thanh.

One spur to tighter rules was a mass shooting, in which 14 people died, in Zug in 2001. Public enthusiasm for guns has declined. Although voters rejected seven years ago a proposal to ban home-storage of weapons, fewer people do so. According to an estimate in 2016, only 24% of Swiss own guns. Increasingly it is the elderly who attend shooting clubs. Many store their weapons there.

The reduced availability of weapons has coincided with—and helps to explain—steadily falling rates of suicide and murder in which guns are used, as well as lower levels of all types of killings. The rate of gun homicides in 2015, 0.2 per 100,000 people, was roughly half the level of the late 1990s. In contrast, America’s figure was 4.0; and over the same period it has barely budged.