You can kill a lot of people faster with a large capacity magazine than with a smaller one, regardless of color. Granted, this would not help prevent most shootings. It would just reduce the number of dead in planned mass homicides which seem to be growing more and more common these days. I think you are on to something about the required Swiss militia training. If we required all young men in the U.S. to undergo similar training, it just might instill a little more knowledge of and respect for firearms, and perhaps more discipline and respect for life in general.
You're correct, the larger magazines are the only issue for reducing mass homicides. Assault weapons are still semi-automatic, so a person can still only shoot as fast as their finger can pull the trigger. I was trying to find figures on mass shootings which listed the types of weapons used, but there doesn't appear to be many figures kept on this. Perhaps someone else can find them. Here are two of the better links I found.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-...gs-invo_b_808603.html#s223212&title=Stockton_ http://www.newsmax.com/US/mass-shootings-us-colorado/2012/07/20/id/445971
The first is on high capacity magazines, and it appears as though most of the crimes are commited using handguns with 15 capacity clips. Not a big jump over 10, but they also used more than one clip. The second is a larger list of the major mass shootings in about a 10 year period. While perhaps sensational, there isn't a great number of the higher death shootings. It appears to me, that ending high capacity clips alone won't do much. Not many of the shootings involve someone firing into a large crowd in a quick manner, as in Aurora. A good number involve going room to room in building, or as in VA tech even building to building. Even if a high capacity clips are used in that type of situation, if not available, I'm pretty sure the results would still have been close to the same with just a regular handgun. I'm not sure, but in a country where there are almost 10,000 homicides on average a year, we seem to be talking about a very small percentage of deaths saved by limiting magazine capacity.
If you make the argument, that any lives saved, are worth it, I would tend to agree. After all, there seems to be no redeeming social value for the high capacity clips. But I also look at it this way. Some might not see any redeeming value for vehicles that can go faster than say, 80 mph. I don't think there are any public l roads in the US where you can go faster than that- legally. Most certainly, I believe figures will show that far more lives would be saved doing this over limiting gun clips to 10 rounds. Someone may say they have a lot of fun going to the track on the weekends and seeing what their vehicle can do. But I have also seen people on youtube having fun blasting a row of pumpkins with their AK-47. What other things can we make illegal, that will save a few lives, that don't appear to have any social value to the majority? Cigarettes? Are we starting to tread upon a slippery slope?
I just figure, once we limit the clip capacity, perhaps even add more control on background checks etc, that in the end it will have a very small effect on the number of deaths. Then what happens? Do the anti-gun folks then go after any semi-automatic weapons? Is military training the answer, as you suggested? Very well could be, the vast majority of people I know from the military are all good citizens. But it didn't help Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy Mcveigh, Sirhan Sirhan, or the Fort Hood Shooter, and those are just the ones I can think of quickly. I saw a quote in one article that "violence is as American as apple pie". I'm afraid that is too true. The USA even produces far more serial killers than any other country, and I don't think they use assault rifles.