To this day, every male, when he turns 20, is issued a full automatic military rifle and required to keep it at home. Universal service in the Militia Army is required. When a Swiss is no longer required to serve, he may keep his rifle (converted from automatic to semi-automatic) or his pistol (if he served as an officer).
All healthy Swiss men aged between 18 and 34 are obliged to do military service and all are issued with assault rifles or pistols which they are supposed to keep at home.
Interest in gun ownership is waning, partly due to the shrinking size of the conscripted militia that serves as Switzerland’s army. Men between the ages of 20 and 30 report for training and are issued military weapons, which they keep at home.
All of the above are from different sources. It appears that your “friend” is applying a little selective memory. It is IMPOSSIBLE for her to have grown up in Switzerland with a father and or uncle or brothers and NOT know about the gun laws there. It is MANDATORY. Sorry.
Actually I have two books on what you just shared, not to mention reading countless articles on the Swiss and the military.
I think she did what I have seen many females do, manage to miss huge swaths of what is going on that doesn’t concern them and interest them.
I have a female friend that was going on against guns one day and I tried to remind her of all the guns in Houston homes when we were growing up, or how many guns she had to walk by to get to my bedroom in my mother’s house, she had totally forgotten such things, dating California girls, I can’t tell you how young females I dated who were “vegetarians” but who ate hamburgers, without getting the connection.
If this conversation switched from “guns” to how well insulated some females can live, in living in their own little world, then we would all be able to understand how a PHD type Swiss girl could grow up and never know about the details of her nation’s military and mandatory service.
I brought up all the obvious questions about boyfriends/father and such, I can also introduce you to many American females who are proud of their father’s war time service, except that they just don’t know what branch he was in, or what he did in the war, and sometimes not know which war it was.