KEY POINTS:
Switzerland, an island of gun culture at the heart of Europe, is agonising over whether to introduce controls on the holding of guns and ammunition as alarm spreads about the number of gun deaths in the country.
The latest incident occurred on the evening of Friday, April 13,
in the restaurant of a hotel in the northern city of Baden - three days before Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in the United States.
In Baden, a 26-year-old bank employee, a member of the state militia like all Swiss men between 20 and 30, 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. The gunman then killed a 71-year-old man at the bar and wounded two others. He stopped firing only when he had used all 20 rounds.
Apart from the number of rounds fired - Cho shot at least 170 times - the other big difference is that the Swiss killer was armed by the state. His right to keep arms and ammunition at home, and to carry them around 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 2 million arms are in private possession in this nation of 7.5 million people, is now under siege. This 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 with a gun 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 then called up for three or four weeks a year for around a decade. Throughout this time they are allowed to keep a rifle and sometimes 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.
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, with a population seven times as large.
Swiss army life
* Switzerland has a population of 7.5 million and an estimated 2 million guns in circulation.
* Most Swiss men are required to serve in the military. They are issued with assault rifles or pistols, or both, which they store at home and keep when they leave the service.
* Gun ownership in the country dates back centuries.
* Swiss officials call the country's defence system the "porcupine" approach: that Switzerland may be small, but that all the weapons act as quills to deter invaders.
- INDEPENDENT
