Facebook posting says the gun-rich Swiss have the lowest firearm crime rate in the civilized world

Gun control advocates say that fewer guns mean less gun crime. But a Dec. 16 posting on Facebook by a group calling itself the Conservatives Club argues exactly the opposite, and uses the example set by Switzerland to prove its point.

The portion of the post, titled "A Little Gun History," that is in all capital letters caught our attention. It says, "Switzerland issues every household a gun! Switzerland's government trains every adult they issue a rifle.


Switzerland has the lowest gun related crime rate of any civilized country in the world!!! It's a no brainer! Don't let our government waste millions of our tax dollars in an effort to make all law abiding citizens an easy target." We thought the assertion that Switzerland "has the lowest gun related crime rate of any civilized country in the world" was worth checking out. (We’ll also give you some background about Switzerland's policy on issuing guns.) (Coincidentally, on Jan. 2, 2013, while we were working on this item, gun policy in Switzerland made the news after a man who started shooting people on the street left three women dead and two men wounded in the Swiss village of Daillon.)

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. READ MORE