Fury in Germany as Hamburg shooting brings ‘lax’ gun laws into focus

Gun laws in Germany, where weapon ownership is among the highest in Europe, could be further tightened after last week’s mass shooting in which seven people, including an unborn child, were killed in a Jehovah’s Witness hall in Hamburg.

The attack has thrown up the perennial question of whether the various parts of the country’s federal system are working together, and strengthened the hand of those in the governing coalition who are seeking stronger gun controls.

Hamburg authorities have highlighted the speed of the police response: a specialist unit arrived within minutes of the first bullets being fired by 35-year-old Philipp Fusz. Since 2021, the city has been piloting a specialist unit modelled on a taskforce formed in Vienna after four people died in a shooting there in November 2020.

Two vehicles, each carrying four heavily armed officers, have been patrolling the streets of Hamburg between noon and 10pm from Monday to Thursday in an initiative lauded as a sign that the authorities have learned the lessons of previous mass shootings.

The officers almost certainly saved many lives by arriving within four minutes of the emergency calls and blasting their way into the church near Hamburg airport as Fusz, a freelance business consultant who left the local Jehovah’s Witness chapter 18 months ago, was attempting to systematically murder the 36 people inside with bursts of fire from his semi-automatic Heckler & Koch P30.

Fusz – who had fallen out with fellow members over a book he had written and self-published and compared to the Bible – was chased to the first storey of the hall, where he died after shooting himself in the chest.

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But people are now asking why the specialist force is not deployed every day. And in a country whose fragmented political system is often a cause for complaint, a reckoning is coming over Hamburg’s weapons control authority’s response to an anonymous letter sent two months ago about Fusz’s mental health.

On 7 February, officers visited Fusz at his flat in west Hamburg but gave him just a verbal warning after finding a loose bullet on top of the safe in which his gun and ammunition were supposed to be stored. The city’s health services seem to have had no involvement in the unannounced visit, despite the red flags of his book and the anonymous letter, which had suggested that Fusz was suffering from a psychological disorder but refused to seek treatment.

A member of Hamburg’s Hanseatic Gun Club, Fusz had held a weapons licence since December last year, and the awarding of this permit is a focus of attention as the people of Hamburg prepare to bury their dead.

Though Germany has some of the strictest gun laws in Europe, it has a high per capita ratio of legally purchased firearms. About a million people legally own more than 5 million guns

Sebastian Fiedler, crime policy spokesman for the parliamentary group of the governing SPD, said: “If not only the on-site inspection had taken place, but this publicly available information had also been consulted, then the law would have provided a sufficient basis for action to request a psychological report. You have to look why the security authorities didn’t get to this point”.

Nancy Faeser, the federal minister for the interior, said she would seek to review a draft amendment to the Weapons Act that has been under consideration since December after the arrest of 25 people suspected of having planned an armed attack on parliament.

“You certainly have to go back to the law and see whether there are still gaps,” she said of the draft law which was published in January. “Above all, we want better networking between the authorities. Of course, the measures should also be proportionate.”

Though Germany has some of the strictest gun laws in Europe, it has a high per capita ratio of firearms. Around a million people legally own a total of more than 5 million guns. Most of them are sport shooters, hunters or foresters, but while violence remains rare, an average of 155 people are killed by gunfire every year. The past two decades have seen a gradual tightening of controls. After 16 people died in a 2002 school shooting in Erfurt, in the state of Thuringia, the age limit for gun ownership was raised from 18 to 21 years. Random spot checks were introduced to ensure guns were being stored properly after the same number of people died in a shooting in 2009 in a school in Winnenden, near Stuttgart.

In response to the murder in 2020 of nine people by Tobias Rathjen, 43, psychological health checks were introduced. Rathjen had been diagnosed with paranoid delusions in 2002 but was still able to buy a Glock 17 9mm Luger.

Faeser had already vowed to introduce further controls, including a total ban on the private ownership of semi-automatic rifles, but she had faced resistance from its coalition partner the liberal FDP.

Irene Mihalic, chief whip of the Greens parliamentary group, said there should not be any further prevarication.“Although such acts cannot be prevented one hundred percent, not everything that is possible is currently being done to ensure that such people do not get hold of firearms.”The death toll in Hamburg could rise further. Nine people were injured in the attacks, four seriously, and Jehovah’s Witnesses’ opposition to blood transfusions is raising a dilemma for doctors.