Sept. 27 2007
Parliament has approved a proposal to ban the long-standing Swiss tradition of keeping army ammunition at home.
With the exception of a few thousand of the 120,000 soldiers in Switzerland's militia army who keep their cartridges at home, all army ammunition will have to be stored in central arsenals. Army guns can still be kept at home.
Also hotly debated in the House of Representatives was a people's initiative launched by the centre-left Social Democratic Party and pacifist organisations to ban the estimated one-and-a-half million military weapons from Swiss households.
The initiative called for army weapons to remain in the barracks, a national gun register, a ban on private individuals buying or owning particularly dangerous guns such as automatic weapons or pump-action shotguns, and tighter controls on those who say they need to carry a firearm.
The anti-gun supporters argued that it was no longer necessary from a military point of view to keep army munitions at home. They also said it was a question of safety, as experts claim around 300 deaths every year are caused by army weapons, which also play a role in domestic violence.
But speakers from the People's Party and the centre-right Radical Party saw the decommissioning as a weakening of Swiss security and as a vote of no confidence in soldiers, adding that the number of abuses with guns was "extremely small".
Five years ago Switzerland was stunned when a gunman shot and killed 14 people in Zug's cantonal parliament with a rifle, before turning the gun on himself.
Debate on the use of firearms was further fuelled in April last year when the husband of former women's ski champion Corinne Rey-Bellet killed his wife and her brother with his army pistol.
