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The shooting occurred at a Kronospan wood processing factory in the town of Menznau, about 14 miles west of Lucerne, the police said in a statement. A spokesman for the police in Lucerne said that the gunman was a 42-year-old employee of the factory, but he gave no further details, adding that the police were at the factory investigating. The helicopter rescue service RGA said it evacuated four seriously injured people to hospital, the Swiss news agency SDA reported.  

 Mass shootings are uncommon in Switzerland, but the shooting in Menznau was the second such episode in two months, and it could revive debate on gun control in Switzerland, where it is estimated that there are between two and three million guns in circulation among the country's population of eight million people.

 In January, a mentally ill man, armed with a hunting rifle and an early-20th-century army carbine, shot and killed three women and wounded two men in the southern Swiss village of Daillon. That shooting renewed calls for stricter gun controls, ranging from setting up a central registry of weapons to ending the tradition that allows people who perform military service to keep army-issue weapons at home.