How are your gun laws structured? Could you briefly describe the purchasing process? Do private citizens have to store their firearms in a centralized location or can they keep them secured at home?

As a Swiss citizen, owning a gun is pretty easy. I’m not an expert and don’t own one, but afaik to buy a gun, one needs to do a background check and have some basic training with it. You can keep your gun at home, but carrying (hidden or open) is only allowed in exceptional cases, e.g. for professional reasons, and must be allowed in a court decision.

I hope these answers cover it more or less, feel free to ask more :-)

How do you feel about Switzerland’s semi direct democracy governance?

Now I’m not sure which part you mean, the direct voting or our parliament / government? In short, I think the biggest flaw which is directly a part of the system is our Ständerat and Ständemehr, which is basically like the US Senate, where the voice of a person from Uri counts 500 times as much as the voice of someone from Zurich.

Then there are the problems outside of it, where I’d say the biggest one is Corporate money influencing voting and elections.

And while sometimes misused, I still like our direct voting on issues. In the past 10 years we (from the left) were able to prevent multiple things decided by the parliament thanks to this system and even succeeded in winning a proposal to raise pensions for poorer people, which (winning a equality issue proposal) has never happened before in Swiss history.

As someone already commented, there is narrative that the free market is the reason for Switzerland’s success. A narrative pushed by corporate media and burguois politicians of course, but imo also not completely untrue.

But I also want to point to a different reason, which is our value system. Due to historical reasons, similar to the US, there is a strong emphasis on personal freedom, usually overshadowing solidarity and equality. A big part of that is for many people the right to own private property and to play as little taxes on it as possible.

Then there’s also protentatisms ideas about work etc.

Good lord Silberschmidt is probably one of my most hated persons in Swiss politics.

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The country? No. But remember we’ve always been (majority) governed by parties that are right-wing corporate lackeys. There’s a lot of criticism of these practices from the left and even the center (sometimes), but those critics are unable to get majorities.

For context, it was clear from the outset that the right wing-free market gov would reject this. The proposed tax was submitted by the Juso (young socialist party) and it’s pretty clear that it will lose a national vote as well by a large margin (as the Swiss voting population is worse free market brained than even the US).

Now why would I consider this still a good move by the Juso? Because it brings up debate. About inheritance tax, but also about the injust society in general and how rich people don’t contribute their part. And in the long term, it moved the overton window to strech further to the left.

I’m Swiss and open to answer questions if you have any.

Maybe, but at least 4 people in the video have lost their jobs over this, so it has at least some consequences.

You’re mixing up two values here. Switzerland imports less than 10% of its electricity, the number you’re probably referring to is the total of “Energieträgern”, so oil, oal, gasoline, etc.

https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/energie/versorgung.html