How I Ended Up On A Trip Through Switzerland

In most correspondence I tend to refer to my late father as “Dear old Dad” or in the acronym be-spoiled argot that is the essence of native DC language -:”DoD”. This story occurs many years ago as I am a young man in my mid teen age years, yet the story and the lesson are as vivid today as it ever was

Dear old Dad

Anyway, my father, the fair haired second son of the New Haven postmaster had after WWII enlistment and battlefield injury, recovered, and in the fullness of time, married my mother and went to work at the Pentagon, which in the 1960’s assigned him as a civilian, again to the European Theater of Operations to some administrative task at a now defunct Army base in Verona, Italy. Thus while he slaves away in the Po valley, my dear Mother, the three wicked Flint sisters (the “Sicked Wisters”) and I were touring somewhere Northeast of Milan by local train and somehow hit Switzerland. We crossed the frontier and immediately boarded a cog railway running local; in order to get somewhere else, probably back across the Italian-Swiss frontier. The cog railway clatters up the mountain and while the view is breathtaking, conversation ceases save the clattering of the laboring cog, suddenly mixed with the opening of a railway door…

Through this door I see a tangle of youth in uniform, summer military uniforms. Then I notice that each of the half dozen uniformed children is carrying a semi-automatic rifle. These 14 year olds where apparently armed to the teeth. I later came to understand that Military Service was compulsory at a very early age in Switzerland.

This image of citizen soldiers being trained in a generations-old tradition has stayed with me as one vision of what the second amendment of our constitution is all about.

For more about this please refer to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Switzerland#Army-issued_arms_and_ammunition_collection

Paul Flint

Citizen Candidate

Sunday, July 22, 2018