This number has almost tripled since 2015, according to GA enquiries with the police. The police have registered the trend nationwide and attribute it, among other things, to the events of New Year's Eve in Cologne. "In most cases, these weapons are not brought for an attack, but to defend oneself," explains psychologist Aygül Geles.

The police decide who is granted a minor gun licence and who is not. This is why the Bonn police headquarters, which is responsible for the city of Bonn, the Rhine-Sieg district on the left bank of the Rhine and the towns of Bad Honnef and Königswinter, keeps daily statistics about the number of people with firearms licences.

As of 17 February, there were 6337 minor firearms certificates in circulation, compared to 6000 in April of the previous year. Since 2018, the allocations have been increasing annually in the low three-digit range. The biggest jump was in 2016, when the number doubled from 2247 to 4269.

The hurdles to obtaining a minor firearms licence are apparently not high. In 2022, only ten applications were rejected. You have to be of age, be responsible and have the sufficient mental and physical aptitude to carry an alarm, irritant or signal gun.

Police spokesperson Simon Rott cannot give any precise information on why the applications are increasing so rapidly. For example, the authority cannot comment on a connection with people's perception of safety. The same applies to the growing readiness to use violence, which Police Commissioner Frank Hoever recently mentioned in an interview with the GA. A growing number of assaults were registered last year. Hoever warned that criminals are increasingly willing to use knives.

As a response, he said, controls at hotspots were to be intensified

The fact that there are more and more minor arms licences is a nationwide development and not a regional phenomenon, Rott explains. "The increase in the middle of the last decade was linked in the media to the events of the New Year's Eve in Cologne in 2015/2016 and a subsequent change in the perception of security," he explains. In the area of responsibility of the Bonn police headquarters, the registration figures for 2016 were noticeably high. "After that, there was a clear decline in the annual number of new registrations."

The police see minor firearms licences as sometimes problematic. "A feeling of increased safety due to carrying weapons can be a fallacy," says Rott. This can increase your own willingness to take risks and may also trigger an escalation of violence in the other person as soon as you pull out a weapon. "Moreover, alarm, irritant or signal weapons make it difficult for helpers and the police to recognise who is the perpetrator and who is the victim. They are often indistinguishable from real firearms," says Rott. In the end, the person carrying the weapon puts themself at risk, because police officers must first assume that the weapon is a live one.

In her day-to-day work, Aygül Geles, a psychologist at the LVR Clinic in Bonn, frequently encounters patients who have experienced assaults and subsequently armed themselves. "The threatening situation was not over for them," she says. Among other reasons, because it took a while for the justice system and the police to take action against the perpetrators, who were then still at large. These are stalking victims or women who have experienced violence at the hands of their husbands. Geles sees this as an understandable defence situation. "You find yourself in a state of helplessness and you are afraid because the perpetrator is choosing the situation. You want to have your own sense of protection in hand."

(Original text: Nicolas Ottersbach / Translation: Jean Lennox)