Rise in gun crime forces Swiss to reconsider right to bear arms

Switzerland, an island of gun culture at the heart of Europe, is agonising over whether to introduce controls on possessing guns and ammunition as alarm spreads about the number of gun deaths in the country.

The latest incident occurred on the evening of Friday 13 April in the restaurant of a hotel in the northern city of Baden - three days before Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in the United States.

In the Baden eruption one man was killed and four wounded. A 26-year-old bank employee who is, like all Swiss men between 20 and 30, a member of the state militia, walked into the hotel and opened fire. Two brothers aged 15 and 16, sitting with their parents, were the first to be struck. The 16-year-old was critically wounded with two bullets in the stomach. The gunman then swung round and took aim at the bar, killing a 71-year-old man and wounding two others. He only stopped firing when he had used up all 20 rounds.

Apart from the number of rounds fired - Cho shot at least 170 times - the other difference is that the Swiss killer was armed by the state. His right to keep arms and ammunition at home, and to carry them freely, is defended as a key civil liberty and guarantee of the nation's independence.

But that argument, used for decades to justify the fact that more than two million arms are in private possession in this nation of 7.5 million people, is now under siege. Last month a senate committee voted overwhelmingly against the holding of ammunition at home. The issue must now be decided in parliament.

The worst massacre in recent Swiss history occurred in September 2001 when a man opened fire during a local government meeting in the town of Zug, south of Zurich, killing 15 people including himself.

Switzerland has no standing army, but all young men are obliged to train as soldiers and are called up for three or four weeks a year for abouta decade. Throughout this time they keep a rifle plus maybe a pistol at home, with ammunition. Once the call-up period ends they are not required to surrender them. The rationale is that the entire population is ready to spring to the nation's defence in the event of the French, Germans or Italians deciding to invade.

They call it the porcupine approach - millions of individuals ready to stiffen like spines if the motherland is threatened. The fact that all Switzerland's neighbours have been at peace for 60 years cuts no ice with the upholders of the policy.

"An army should be ready ... so soldiers should have weapons and ammunition at home," declares Ulrich Schluer, an MP who sits on a committee on security.

But the price of eternal vigilance is frequent funerals: in 2005, 48 people were murdered by gunfire in Switzerland - about the same number as in England and Wales, which have a population seven times as large. According to the International Action Network on Small Arms, an anti-gun organisation based in the UK, 6.2 people died of bullet wounds in Switzerland in 2005 per 100,000 of population, second only to the US figure of 9.42, and more than double the rate of Germany and Italy.

Annabelle, a women's magazine, was enlisted in the campaign to ban the gun. "We don't know any women who want a weapon in the house," says Lisa Feldmann, the editor. "Women and the younger generation think this is crazy."