Geneva: The Swiss voted Sunday to toughen their gun laws and bring them in line with EU legislation, heeding warnings that rejecting the change could have threatened relations with the bloc. Final results showed that voters overwhelmingly supported reforming Swiss gun laws, with a full 63.7 percent casting their ballot in favour.
A majority of voters in all but one of Switzerland’s 26 cantons backed the reform, with the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland the only outlier. A demand from the neighbouring European Union that the Swiss toughen their gun laws prompted a rare national debate over firearm ownership in the wealthy Alpine nation, which has a deeply-rooted gun culture.