At least five people were shot and killed in a suburb of Hamburg on Monday despite Germany’s stringent gun controls, which include gun licensing, registration, confiscatory actions, and other controls.
Breitbart News reported the shooting and pointed out that NTV indicated it took place near a youth centre.
Two people have been arrested in connection with the incident.
Germany is heavily gun controlled and Breitbart News noted the stringency of the controls following the June 22, 2016, Munich shooting in which nine were killed.
At that time, the University of Sydney described Germany’s gun laws as “restrictive,” noting that even the acquisition of a semiautomatic pistol required “special authorization.” Gaining such authorization began with passing “a background check which considered criminal, mental health, and additional records.” But that was only the beginning. As The New York Times summarized, the process of acquiring the gun would occur “over the course of several months” and would include securing “a certificate that proves you know how to handle both the weapon and its ammunition.”
Moreover, NYT pointed that would-be gun owner would also have show he “[could] store it safely, in a place to which only…[the owner would] have access.”
The gun controls which were in force in 2016 were part of the Weapons Act (2002, 2013) and those controls have been increased over the years.
For instance, Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior noted that a new weapons law, which took effect on October 31, 2024, “makes it possible to ban the carrying of knives, for example in areas such as train stations or at public events, and it prohibits flick knives in all but a few cases.”
Police use a dog as they investigate near the scene where five people were killed in a shooting in Stade, northern Germany, a city some 50 kilometres west of Hamburg, on June 29, 2026. (Ibrahim OT / AFP via Getty Images)
The new law also authorized “weapons authorities to confiscate weapons and ammunition temporarily while proceedings to withdraw and revoke weapons licenses are still under way.”
Additionally, whereas the Weapons Act (2013) required “all the important information on weapons and their owners…[to be] centrally recorded and stored,” an amendment was later used to expand the register “to include additional information, providing a fuller picture: for example, in addition to providing information on the legal private possession of firearms requiring a license, the register makes it possible to track the entire life cycle of a weapon by including information on manufacturers and dealers.”
Despite all these controls, five people were shot and killed Monday in a suburb of Hamburg.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.