Posted on 05/10/2015 1:35:32 AM PDT by BlackVeil
One young Swiss man who worked for me opted out of the military reserve duty and did work in a hospital to meet his commitment. My recollection is all in the reserves have a government issued gun but ammo they purchase on their own for home use. There was a rifle range a short walk from our home - the bunker from which they shot was on one hillside and the target across a little valley to another hillside with a walking path underneath. Fun walk. Fortunately the sight lines were such they couldn’t aim down at the path.
“I thought all those Eurowinnie nations outlawed guns in private hands.”
Not the Swiss - although they are not on board with the concept of guns for personal defense - so you have to have your gun well-secured (maybe partially disassembled) to the point of it taking a long time to configure even for home defense. But they like the idea of everyone being able to fire upon invaders and it probably played into Hitler leaving them alone.
I worked for a guy who grew up in Basel during the war. He said the German radio propaganda used to broadcast that “only we Germans and the Cow-Swiss” were prepared for the war. Basel was only one of two Swiss cities bombed during the war by the U.S. The other was a small town that happened to be on the “German” side of the Rhine, but was actually a part of Switzerland. A plate his mother had mounted on the wall fell off and broke during the bombing, but otherwise his family did not suffer any loss. Still when the bombing makes your house shake, it leaves an impression.
It was his contention that the bombing of Basel was not accidental. Basel was the location of many high ranking Nazis’ second homes, and the section of Basel that was bombed was heavily “nazified”. He thought the U.S. was sending a message to Switzerland, to warn them against being a haven for fleeing Nazis.
I would have to agree....you are a thousand times safer in Switzerland than you would be in most US urban areas. With the exception of Zurich....I can’t think of any Swiss city where you might want to be careful about hanging out. You can go to some Alpin towns and ask when the last time when anyone got robbed within the town’s city limits....and folks start to think back twenty and thirty years ago.
I would have to agree....you are a thousand times safer in Switzerland than you would be in most US urban areas. With the exception of Zurich....I can’t think of any Swiss city where you might want to be careful about hanging out. You can go to some Alpin towns and ask when the last time when anyone got robbed within the town’s city limits....and folks start to think back twenty and thirty years ago.
More from the article: “He often cursed at his neighbors, ‘I’ll get you, Swiss pig!’ Especially the women in the apartment building were afraid of him. Building managers said that cursing and threatening was not enough reason to evict him.” The murdered were the parents of his estranged (real Swiss) wife, a brother-in-law, and a neighbor who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The POS then killed himself.
The Swiss are not only very correct, they are also very politically correct.
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