Without answering my question about it being a default, you're misstating my position. Let me try again:
The touchstone of whether a government trusts it people is allowing them to keep and bear arms without conditions besides the usual disbarments for criminals and the seriously mentally ill.
This is only tangentially related to their actually doing so and why. 14-17% of American gunowners (if you assume there are only 75 million, which I think is low) do so at least to hunt. In Western Europe that's obviously a lot more limited due to population density. In Switzerland, a max of 600,000 or so can be issued the current service rifle (because that's how many were manufactured...) and serve in any capacity including the reserves, which by tradition is structured differently (e.g. personal weapon stored at home).
The best source I can find now for a relevant quote from John McPhee's La Place de la Concorde Suisse, written back in 1984 when this was very significant, is "Communist Swiss soldiers keep rifles and machine guns at home. It is said that this is not dangerous for political purposes; it is dangerous only for the wife."
The touchstone of whether a government trusts it people is allowing them to keep and bear arms without conditions besides the usual disbarments for criminals and the seriously mentally ill.
This is only tangentially related to their actually doing so and why. 14-17% of American gunowners (if you assume there are only 75 million, which I think is low) do so at least to hunt. In Western Europe that's obviously a lot more limited due to population density. In Switzerland, a max of 600,000 or so can be issued the current service rifle (because that's how many were manufactured...) and serve in any capacity including the reserves, which by tradition is structured differently (e.g. personal weapon stored at home).
The best source I can find now for a relevant quote from John McPhee's La Place de la Concorde Suisse, written back in 1984 when this was very significant, is "Communist Swiss soldiers keep rifles and machine guns at home. It is said that this is not dangerous for political purposes; it is dangerous only for the wife."