Do Germans Need Arms For Protection?

 This is one of those essays I write every few years and lay out vastly different landscape than what Americans typically think of.

First, I live on the outer ring of Wiesbaden (town of 285,000) and day or night....I  can venture out and have zero threats.  Within the heart of the city?  I can walk 100-percent of the town in daylight hours and feel zero threat.  A  walk at night?  I can point at three areas of town which I consider in some odd way as a 'no-go' area...mostly over druggies and snatch-and-go robberies (say after 10 PM).  

If I expand my travels to the whole state of Hessen?  About 99-percent of Hessen, I'd put in the category of absolute safe status....day or night.   The cities like Darmstadt, Frankfurt, or Hanau....they all have that same night-time list of areas to avoid.   

Finding some situation of characters trying to break into my house?  Ten years ago, it would have been ultra-rare to have a break-in.  In the past decade, break-ins have increased.  But typically, they are looking for unoccupied houses, and a situation of five minutes to snatch-and-go.

Weird characters running around and looking for physical threats with guns or knives?  It's just awful rare that you hear of some gunplay.  This week....over by the river in Wiesbaden....some gun-play took place....some idiot firing a round or two into a car...shattering glass and scaring the crap out of the occupant in the car.  Cops came to figure the guy who did the gunplay...arresting him, but not giving any logic or reason to act.

Knife threats?  This is the one you see on the rise.  It typically involves some juvenile (say 14 to early 20s) and working on a snatch-and-go strategy.

The idea of arming folks or needing it?  Anyone could go and apply for the license....just to have a pistol or rifle in their house.  Vast majority of people go without the necessity of the license or the pistol.  It's time consuming to get the license, but not impossible (unless you were a nutcase).

The act of carrying a pistol around?  If you had the license.....you might be able to convince the cops on a body-guard type situation but getting that license might be more difficult, and frankly.....the question comes up...if you aren't walking in some no-go area at 11 PM...why would you need to special license or the pistol?

Someone (An American) once asked me on the comparison of Frankfurt to any metro US city (like Chicago or Baltimore)....to which I just started laughing. I agreed....if you wanted cocaine or LSD....you could find it in Frankfurt in three minutes flat....but the threat angle like you'd see in Chicago or Baltimore to Frankfurt was marginal.  Maybe I could compare Frankfurt to Nashville in some way, but you just don't have gang activity or wild shooting events to occur.   

So the lesser threat stuff....leading back to better policing?  I don't tend to buy into that discussion much.  Police patrols are made of two cops...given an ample amount of training and practice-shooting.  They will go from real-nice to ample-use of force in a matter of seconds...if necessary.  Prosecutors?  They tend to do their job.

If things were wild and reckless, with sixty folks shot nightly across Germany and public safety were questionable.....then you'd see folks openly discussing a license and the carrying of arms.  But you simply don't have that going on.  I won't say it's like some rural small town in Iowa....but it's hard to imagine any German city getting as bad as Portland or Atlanta.