It’s always amusing to read and hear about all the nonsense shared as though Switzerland is some form of “gun-panacea”… believe me, compared to many of our neighbours that have stricter firearm laws – IT IS NOT.
The devastation felt of life loss from firearms has been having huge consequences in every factor of life in Switzerland. Jobs, housing, education, businesses in both rural and cities… everything. Every family doesn’t seem to be immune to the horror we are suffering.
America is huge compared to Switzerland – and when murder and suicide take place here compared to America – in a country of only 8 million, one death either by murder and/or suicide has huge ramifications and it’s effect is felt in every sector of our daily lives.

“One source of information about guns is GunPolicy.Org, an evidence-based database on firearm safety hosted by the Sydney School of Public Health in Australia and partly co-funded, coincidentally, by the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. We ran some comparisons through their database.

We’re not going to get into the definition of what makes a “civilized” country; instead, we looked at GunPolicy.org’s data on gun homicide rates for 24 countries, mostly in western Europe but also Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.

Switzerland’s gun homicide rate was anything but “the lowest.”

It was fourth highest.

Only Greece, Ireland and the United States had higher rates.

(Switzerland also has the seventh highest suicide rate and the third highest rate of gun-related suicide, according to the GunPolicy.org data. In the latter case, only the United States and Finland had higher rates. Switzerland and Italy were tied for second for the rate of unintentional gun deaths; the United States was number one.)

“Guns kept at home are not necessarily dangerous in the streets, but mostly in situations that happen at home, such as suicide and murder of family members (especially females). In this respect, Switzerland has one of the highest proportions in the Western world,” said Martin Killias, professor of criminology and criminal law at the University of Zurich Law School.

Nonetheless, we looked at its database on various crime categories such as assault, robbery, and theft, where guns were most likely to be involved, to see whether the crime rate in Switzerland was really that low. It wasn’t:

Eleven out of 26 countries had lower rates of theft than Switzerland.
Thirteen of 26 had lower rates of robbery.
Six of 26 had lower rates of assault.
So the Swiss can’t boast the lowest crime rate, another claim gun advocates make.

www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2013/jan/06/facebook-posts/facebook-posting-says-gun-rich-swiss-have-lowest-f/

In Switzerland – every single day, one person kills himself or herself with a gun, more often than not a military weapon – a fact the authors say is directly connected to lax Swiss firearms legislation.

According to the study, published in the current edition of the American Journal of Public Health, Switzerland and the United States have the highest rates in the world of suicide involving guns.

Suicides are also five times more common than the total number of deaths related to car accidents, drug abuse and AIDS combined.

www.swissinfo.ch/eng/high-gun-suicide-rate-linked-to-easy-access/982416

(the photographs are completely misleading – all the weapons are obviously military issued. Clearly, no one in the photograph is over age 30; they are either on-leave or on the way to military training. Of course, none of the weapons are ever allowed to be loaded while off-base. Any form of break of this rule calls for huge reprimands and/or dismissal.)