After Aarau: the blind spot in the gun debate is hobby hunting

At the edge of a rave party in Aarau, 22-year-old Maria S. was shot dead at the end of August.

Police arrested a 43-year-old Swiss man on urgent suspicion of the crime; according to police statements, he is thought to have fired around 40 shots. According to SRF, the suspected murder weapon is a semi-automatic Kalashnikov AK-74, which the man is said to have acquired legally in the canton of Jura some twenty years ago, together with further weapons, at a time when this was still permitted. Semi-automatic weapons lawfully acquired back then are today in principle subject to a registration requirement. The case has triggered a debate about Swiss gun law.

In this debate, one argument stands out that points beyond the individual case. The independent member of the Council of States Daniel Jositsch summed it up to SRF: the harder it is for people at heightened risk to obtain a weapon, the lower the likelihood of such acts. Jositsch said he could imagine retroactively obliging owners of weapons held under the old law to provide proof that they are sport shooters or collectors. Social Democrat member of the Council of States Franziska Roth goes further, considering a future ban on semi-automatic weapons without exception, along with the confiscation of those already purchased.

The thrust is clear: anyone posing a heightened risk should in future have to justify their continued possession of a weapon. In this debate, however, an entire area of private access to weapons remains unmentioned.

Access to hunting weapons is missing from the debate

In the 2025 hunting year, 29’328 people hunted in Switzerland. The federal hunting statistics record 74’914 wild ungulates and 23’152 predators such as foxes and martens killed that year. These two frequently cited figures, however, capture only part of the picture: they do not include game birds, brown hares and other small game. If these species are added, more than 120’000 wild animals are killed each year in Switzerland by hobby hunting, mostly for no reason at all. Hunting therefore means regular access to firearms for a large, institutionally organised group. Hunting weapons are designed to kill wild animals. Precisely for that reason, their private possession and use demand particular care and control from the perspective of animal welfare and public safety.

Unlike the semi-automatic weapons under old law now being discussed, the continued access to weapons enjoyed by holders of hunting licences is hardly ever publicly scrutinised in terms of suitability, changes in health or potential danger. At the same time, there is no systematic nationwide statistic on whether and how often people holding a hunting licence use weapons in violent crimes. As we have already documented, nobody in Switzerland knows how many such offences are committed by people with a hunting licence, simply because the data is not collected. This gap in the data prevents any serious risk assessment.

Not a national problem: a series that crosses borders

Anyone who thinks this is a peculiarly Swiss problem is ignoring the facts. In our section Crime and Hunting we have for years been documenting similar cases in which hobby hunters turned their legal access to hunting weapons and their familiarity with lethal violence against people, both in Switzerland and abroad.

In Switzerland, in July 2026 a 59-year-old hobby hunter from Ticino shot his ex-wife in the Blenio Valley and then blew up a house, injuring several police officers. Nobody heard a bang when the fatal shot was fired, which is why, according to RSI, the Ticino police assume a silencer was used. Back in 2019, a 47-year-old hobby hunter in Courfaivre, in the canton of Jura, killed, entrenched in the cantonal hunting association as a hunting instructor and president of trophy assessment, shot his wife. A few days earlier she had filed a complaint stating that she had been held at gunpoint and raped; a restraining order was in force and several firearms had been seized. A lawyer for the family later accused the judicial authorities of having confiscated the man's handguns while leaving the check incomplete.

Abroad, the cases keep coming: in Germany, in February 2026 in Strullendorf near Bamberg, a 52-year-old hobby hunter is believed to have shot his wife and both his children and then took his own life; a few months earlier, in November 2025, a 63-year-old hobby hunter in the Reutlingen area killed five family members. In Sweden, in February 2025, a 35-year-old man holding a permit for four hunting weapons carried out the worst mass shooting in the country's history in Orebro, leaving ten people dead. These cases appear in no hunting accident statistics, because they are recorded as criminal offences, not as hunting accidents.

What the research shows

The connection is not merely anecdotal. Forensic pathologist Alexia Delbreil and criminologist Jean-Louis Senon analysed 42 intimate partner homicides handled by the Cour d’Appel de Poitiers: among the femicides committed with firearms, around 71 per cent were carried out with hunting rifles. The reason lies in availability: hunting weapons are “weapons of opportunity”, kept within easy reach in the home. Psychiatrist Jean-Louis Terra noted that the risk of a woman being killed in a household containing a firearm is five times higher – a finding he described in 2021 as still valid.

Then there is the personality research. The doctoral thesis by Ursula Grohs, to date the only systematic study in the German-speaking world, found that hobby hunters rate themselves as significantly more aggressive than non-hunters and more frequently resolve conflicts through dominance and control. International studies on the “Dark Triad” personality traits (Kavanagh et al., analysed by Beattie in 2019) point in the same direction: the willingness to kill animals without necessity correlates with personality patterns that are regarded as risk factors in other contexts. Tellingly, in the German-speaking world – where more than half a million people legally carry hunting weapons – there has to this day been hardly any independent follow-up research into these findings.

This is precisely where the security-policy point lies: anyone who has access to lethal weapons over a longer period should be subject to effective and ongoing checks where concrete risks exist, regardless of whether the weapon is an assault rifle held under the old law or a hunting rifle. The fact that there is no Switzerland-wide data on the frequency of such acts is not an argument against such checks, but an argument for them.

Age and fitness

With increasing age, eyesight, reaction time and cognitive performance may be impaired. In an activity that involves handling firearms in the field, this argues for regular, risk-based fitness assessments. Whether a fixed upper age limit would additionally be sensible and proportionate must be examined on the basis of accident and health data. Here too, what is needed first is a robust survey, which is currently lacking.

What follows from this

If, after Aarau, politicians are serious about discussing risk, fitness and ongoing controls in relation to private gun ownership, they must not leave access to hunting weapons out of the picture. IG Wild beim Wild calls for regular medical and psychological fitness assessments for holders of hunting licences, following the Dutch model, as well as a scientifically grounded rule for older age groups. A firearms-law debate that scrutinises assault rifles held under the old law but leaves out regular private access to hunting weapons remains incomplete.