Side story on the recent gun spree

[Stan]

Stan, the GSG9 guys are only a tiny part of the German police special team s realm.

The police in German cities has what's known as MEK and SEK, with SEK being remotely similar to GSG9 (though not tasked to care about cases like kidnapped airliners, for example) while MEKs are a kind of reinforcement for arrests and also mobile observation units (for lengthy observations).
MEKs do their arrests when the suspect is moving in the public, while the SEK does so if much resistance is expected and in static (barricade, hostage) situations.

Fuchs,
Those are in fact who we work with now, but on a much smaller scale under the guise of the European Bomb Techs network. We are not part of a commando unit, but by law, we support the commandos here (very similar to your SEK). A strange relationship that requires cooperation if we are to succeed. All of us carry government issued firearms and most of us have at least one personal firearm.

Again, the very existence of the MEK shows that German police work isn't much about guns. A MEK policeman can spend years in such a unit without ever needing to draw his weapon and aim at somebody.
Their surprise arrests are more about Ju Jutsu (a German-collected, Japanese-named collection of unarmed close combat techniques including plenty submission techniques; official German police sport) than about pointing guns.

MEK seems to be more of a specialized SWAT support team and their skills are certainly in high demand and perhaps a bit expensive to operate. Just my opinion. My brother in law has been with the Capital police EOD for over 20 years and also acknowledges that SWAT teams as well as under cover CID form an intricate part of many sting operations that often work out without the outward use of firearms. Regarding martial arts: generally speaking you can have no way of knowing how you will actually react during a reside position. I spent a year with Koreans on the MDL practicing tae kwon-do and it's not as simple nor effective as drawing a weapon - especially when you already have an AK pointed at you.

The American approach is much more loose in regard to pointing guns at people (and more), and it shows in the quantity of shots fired at people. This is mirroring the civilian approach, and I consider this reliance on guns very unsatisfactory, to say the least.

We may disagree on this point and so be it.
I look back on instances in the USA such as the 1997 shootout in Hollywood and 2007 Virginia Tech massacre where everyday patrolmen were simply outgunned and had to wait for SWAT to come in. German police would have perhaps tackled this situation differently and we can argue that til the dogs come home. To no avail, we will simply disagree !

I conclude we have a much larger, and, at times, more severe problem with gun-related criminal incidences than some of Europe experiences (having lived abroad more than 35 years). The examples above involved some real firepower and the police were simply outgunned. It's no surprise that our law enforcement and public are more apt to pulling a firearm than taking self defense classes.