About firearms, police and culture in general:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffeng...in_Deutschland
(German wikipedia article on firearms use by police in Germany)

The left column is the year, the central one the killed people and the right one is the quantity of shots fired (at people, excluding animals)
The statistics about recent years are reliable and from official annual reports (data pre-1978 is known to be incomplete).

year kills shots
2007 12 46
2008 10 37
2009 6 57
2010 8 47
2011 6 36
2012 8 36

population: roughly 80 million.
The figure for 2012 is the equivalent of about 100 shots fired on humans by all U.S. policemen in a whole year.

You could basically give the German policemen single-shot pistols and for a while even dummy pistols to almost all of them. It wouldn't make much of a difference.
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Whatever problems the United States has with guns (and this includes "Stand your ground"), they're first and foremost rooted in culture (=a failure of culture).

The German police's culture is distinctly different from the American one, and I don't merely base this on TV.
The German police doesn't handcuff much, it doesn't intimidate much, it has no tasers. It usually overtakes cars before stopping them, too (they'd like to change this, but there aren't actually many problems with it).

The statistics show by orders of magnitude more cases of policemen/policewomen being assaulted severely than police shots fired.