Switzerland Guns
>> Friday, February 22, 2013
Switzerland has one of
the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, but little gun-related
street crime - so some opponents of gun control hail it as a place where
firearms play a positive role in society. However, Swiss gun culture is
unique, and guns are more tightly regulated than many assume.
Throughout the attack, Anne Ithen kept her eyes shut.
"I didn't want to see it. I didn't want those images in my
head for the rest of my life... but I remember everything, every
detail," she tells me. "Ninety bullets were fired and of course there
was the homemade bomb - there was a hell of a noise."
She drops her head slightly as she takes herself back to the
Zug cantonal assembly chamber on the afternoon of 27 September 2001,
where she was chairing the council meeting. She remembers hearing a loud
bang and thinking briefly that someone had accidentally upturned the
coffee table in the corridor.
Then the door burst open and she saw Freidrich Leibacher, a local man, dressed in a police vest and laden with guns.
Anne refused to have a gun in the house, even before the attack
"I knew immediately what was going to happen," she tells me simply.
Leibacher, who had a grudge against the officials of the Zug
parliament, shot dead 14 people and injured 18 others before turning the
gun on himself.
"All that noise..." says Anne hesitantly with her eyes
closed. "And yet so much quiet too, as people hid or pretended to be
dead. I remember a silence, and his swearing…and just the noise of his
boots pacing around the room."
Anne Ithen was shot three times, in the spine, the thigh and the abdomen.
"I knew I was paralysed," she says factually. "You see I
didn't feel the other two shots, but the shot that hit my spinal cord
splintered and entered my lungs. I couldn't breathe and really feared I
was going to die from suffocation." She gives me a wry, ironic smile.
"And then someone shouted, 'It's over!'... whatever that meant."
Anne is now a paraplegic. She lost two-thirds of her stomach,
one kidney and much of her large intestine. She has nothing but
admiration for the surgical team who managed to save her life.
"They had to be pretty creative," she laughs. "It was hard to
put together a functioning body from the bits and pieces that were
left."
Leibacher declared a "day of rage" against the Zug assembly
Anne admits that she has always hated guns and when, long
before the Zug attack, her partner moved in with her, she told him
firmly that his Swiss army gun - which all Swiss men of fighting age are
issued with - would not be living with them.In February 2011, she voted in favour of a referendum motion which called for all militia firearms to be stored in public arsenals and for a national gun registry to be established. But 56.3% of voters were opposed to the idea.
"I think we are too lax with gun laws in Switzerland," she
tells me. "I was very disappointed the referendum didn't get a
majority... especially as we have seen more shooting recently here."
Last month, in the French-speaking village of Daillon, 100km
(62 miles) from Geneva, a psychologically disturbed man opened fire on
locals, killing three people and wounding two others. Police had already
confiscated weapons from the gunman in 2005, after he had been placed
in psychiatric care.
Inevitably, his actions prompted a fresh wave of debate in Switzerland about its relatively liberal gun laws.
According to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, there are
about 89 civilian-owned guns for every 100 people who live in the United
States. Switzerland ranks third in terms of gun ownership, the Survey estimates, with 3.4 million guns among its population of nearly eight million.
Target shooting is a popular national sport but many of the firearms in Switzerland are military weapons.
Articles Source : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21379912 Read more...
