When you think of a shooting range, you usually picture an enclosed space or maybe even an abandoned junkyard. Rarely, if ever, do you imagine it located on a busy road.
And yet, the Brünnlisau shooting range in Switzerland is just that. Not only is the shooting range located near the Ausserlatterbach highway (one of the busiest in the country), but the targets shot by its clientele are on the opposite side of the road.
In an interview with Tom Scott, Brünnlisau shooting range president Edwin Karlen says around 160 gun club members practice regularly. That’s in addition to them hosting a hundred or more soldiers for their compulsory gun training. All in all, Karlen estimates there are about 80,000 live rounds fired at the 12 targets per year.
That’s a lot of people firing guns over a highway. So how is it that there have been no accidents in the almost 24 years since the range was opened?
For one thing, Switzerland has very strict gun control regulations. While over 2.4 million Swiss citizens have firearms, these are registered and are obtained only after months of thorough training.
At the Brünnlisau shooting range specifically, there are areas where riflemen can load, shoot, and unload their firearms. You have to be lying down prone before you can fire your gun – and this puts a wide, 30-cm thick concrete wall between you and the highway. This means that there is absolutely no way you can shoot someone on the road unless you purposefully stand up and aim at them.
But why would you even try it? After going through all the training and getting your gun permit, would you waste it all by just standing up and taking a pot shot at some random person? Not only would you have to navigate the reinforced concrete wall, but the shooting range tenants would stop you on the spot before you could even fire your gun.
The other side of the shooting range (the one people are trying to shoot at) looks like a deserted plot of land. Twelve targets call this place home and are fitted with electronic sensors and microphones. The sensors measure things like bullet trajectory and wind direction, while the microphones specifically check the amount of pressure each bullet delivers onto a target.
Once you’re done, you unload your weapon before getting out of the prone position. Who would have thought that such a simple rule would save countless lives?
Tom Scott goes through great lengths to showcase some of the most interesting places in the world. Be sure to check out his YouTube channel to see each and every one of them!
