The Swiss helpfully don't keep records of gun deaths which is handy for gun nuts (a case of fingers in ears) but international surveys have shown that they do not have some magical low gun death figure.
As a prosperous country with little social problems you would expect that this would give them lower gun deaths than the US despite having higher gun ownership, but compared to the UK, the Swiss are shooting each other in droves. Lets kill this stupid right-wing lie.
Your data is incomplete; you fail to cite the murder vs. suicide statistic. If a person is suicidal they will find a way... Here is the data as of 2010:
ReplyDeleteNumber of gun deaths goes down in Switzerland
Fewer people have died of gunshot wounds in Switzerland in recent years.
While 291 fell victim to a bullet in 2007, the figure was 259 in 2008, the Federal Statistics Office announced on Tuesday.
In both years, most of those deaths were suicides: 264 in 2007, and 239 the following year.
Most of 2008’s victims were male; 13 per cent were female. In 2007, women accounted for 19 per cent of victims.
As the office pointed out, the number of gun deaths has sunk by nearly 50 per cent in the past decade. In 1998, there were 466 victims – of which 413 were suicides.
On February 13, Swiss voters will have their say on an initiative to ban Swiss soldiers from keeping their military-issue guns at home. Proponents argue that it is dangerous to have weapons stored in private homes as opposed to arsenals.
Because of the initiative, the statistics office has also provided an analysis of crimes involving a bullet.
Of the 236 homicides and attempted homicides reported by police in 2009, 55 were committed by gun. Among those 55, 24 of the victims actually died.
Meanwhile, there were 524 cases of aggravated assault in 2009, 11 by bullet. Of the 3,500 robbery offences, 416 involved a gun.
swissinfo.ch and agencies