This past Sunday 56 percent of Swiss voters threw out a proposal to ban army-issue firearms from the home and to set up a central arms register:
The initiative also called for a strict licensing system for the use of firearms and sought a ban on the purchase of automatic weapons and pump action shotguns.
The voting broke down along expected demographic lines:
A majority of cantons voted against the initiative. Support came from several, mainly urban regions including Geneva, Basel and Zurich. Opposition was strongest in rural areas in eastern and central Switzerland as well as in the southern Italian-speaking canton of Ticino.
The result is a blow for supporters — a broad coalition of NGOs, trade unions, churches, pacifists and centre-left parties.
Actually, there’s a more important demographic rift:
According to Claude Longchamp, who heads gfs.bern, there’s a 24 percentage point difference between male and female voters, which represents the widest gender-based difference his institute has seen in 10 years of research.
“Many women believe that it is unnecessary to keep a firearm at home nowadays,” he told the website swissinfo.ch, “whereas men typically fear for cherished Swiss traditions, and therefore tend to oppose the initiative.”
The arguments for the initiative struck me as especially weak:
“If you make firearms less accessible, there will be fewer suicides. It’s that simple,” Elsa Kurz, from the Geneva-based group Stop Suicide, told the Associated Press. Switzerland has the highest rate of suicide by firearm of any European nation — about 26 percent, compared to 2.8 percent in the UK and about 1 percent in Germany.
Does reducing the fraction of suicides committed by firearm help anyone?
Switzerland’s rate of gun murder is still relatively low, about 0.3 homicides by firearm per 100,000 people (compared to 4.2 per 100,000 in the United States). And gun-rights advocates argue that restricting firearms won’t bring down the suicide rate overall. “Anyone who wants to commit suicide will find a way,” said Willy Pfund, president of the gun-rights group Pro Tell, according to the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger.