[staunch]

1. You have no stats on what has happened with German police warning shots over the years. It's quite possible there were innocent bystanders hurt.

2. It wouldn't be worth killing a single innocent bystander to save 10 violent criminals in my book.

3. German police very rarely fire warning shots at all. That doesn't make it not reckless, it just makes a bad outcome less likely to occur.

[jarek]

1. Unless I'm missing something neither do you. It would seem to me that it should be quite easy to find mentions of people killed or hurt by warning shots as it is not common for people to die of bullets falling from the sky unexpectedly. Absence of such data would suggest that this doesn't happen rather than that we don't hear about it.

[hej]

Possible. Unlikely. I couldn’t find anything by googling around. It’s pretty obvious that those warning shots have an extremely low probability of actually hurting anyone.

Something with a low probability of hurting someone and done with good justification cannot be reckless in my eye. Celebratory gunfire? Reckless. Warning shots? Not.