There's a Constitutional Conservative Way to End Mass Shootings

America is now experiencing around one mass shooting a day. There’s a constitutional, effective, solution: honoring the Second Amendment in full, not just by halves.

Restore our constitutional right to a well regulated militia.

What’s honoring the full Second Amendment have to do with ending mass gun violence? Call it “The Swiss Mix.”

Switzerland is as gun-loving as any red state in America. It has not had a mass shooting in 21 years and its rate of gun-related homicide is one-tenth of ours. How can that be?

The core of the Swiss policy mix, a high-gun-ownership/low-gun-violence culture, derives from the fact that most Swiss men are required to join the Swiss Army and to be trained and drilled and appropriately managed in executing their patriotic duties to defend Switzerland.

The U.S. equivalent would be to serve in a well regulated state militia by the reconstitution of the various state militias (some still exist in limited form) or the creation of an auxiliary to the National Guard (into which most state militias were subsumed) reporting exclusively to the governor, eliminating factors like age discrimination.

Per BusinessInsider:

Switzerland hasn't had a mass shooting since 2001…. The country has about 2 million privately owned guns in a nation of 8.3 million people. … The country's overall murder rate is near zero. … Many Swiss see gun ownership as part of a patriotic duty to protect their homeland. … Switzerland has mandatory military service for men. The government gives all men between the ages of 18 and 34 deemed "fit for service" a pistol or a rifle and training on how to use them.

Bonus, the Swiss seem to be excelling in that good old American value, “the pursuit of happiness.”

The Swiss have been consistently near the top of this list. In 2017, when the UN ranked Switzerland fourth overall among the world's nations, the report authors noted that the country tends to do well on "all the main factors found to support happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income, and good governance."

What’s not to love? Consider too that, per SwissInfo.ch:

Switzerland’s democratic history, decentralized government, relatively high levels of gun ownership, and accepting attitude towards guns provide useful similarities to the US. Switzerland is second only to the United States among developed countries in gun ownership, with roughly the same proportion of gun-owning households. … However, it still has only a quarter of the number of gun-related deaths and an even smaller fraction of gun-related homicides (0.5 per 100,000 inhabitants) than the United States (5 per 100,000). The question is: Why is there such a difference between the two countries? … TIME and the BBC have reported that the Swiss view gun possession as a patriotic duty and important component of national security.

So! To dramatically reduce gun violence give us more, not less, of the Second Amendment! As Rachel Alexander and I wrote in The Bill of Rights Sentinel last August:

There’s no justification for how self-styled defenders of the Second Amendment defaulted facing abdication of the guarantee of the right to “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”
A proper defense of the Second Amendment must defend it in full. Not by halves.
…
Joining or participating in a well-regulated militia, state-chartered or auxiliary to the National Guard, reporting exclusively to the elected state governor, without age limitation or other arbitrary restrictions, confers honorable status. It will provide a way to issue taxpayer-funded weapons and ammunition to its members, provide training, drilling, discipline, and the legitimate exclusion of violent criminals and those dangerously unstable.

We must eliminate the daily mass shootings. But not by taking away guns from the responsible and law-abiding, not by limiting the ownership of “assault rifles” or magazines, not by “red flag” laws allowing officious strangers to erode our Constitutional rights, not by repealing the Willowbrook-era laws freeing psychotics from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” horrific mental hospitals.

As I wrote at Newsmax a little over a year ago:

The solution lies in more, not less, respect for the Second Amendment. … Safety cannot be legitimately secured by eroding the right to keep and bear arms. Eroding any element of the Bill of Rights is a political nonstarter by virtue of America’s love of liberty.
What to do? Follow Switzerland. Switzerland has a gun culture that makes Texas’s look like a Quaker meeting … with one-tenth of America’s gun violence.

Preventing gun violence in America demands more from us than the thoughts and prayers of the right-thinking right or tolerating the chilling infringement of a constitutional right by the pious left. It demands that we demand our constitutional right to “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State….”