“Sounds like in that case, an MP-5 would have been ideal.”
That is basically what they use in European terminals (Frankfurt comes to mind as it was the first airport terminal that I noticed police equipped with fully automatic weapons.) Granted, European terminals needed the additional firepower long before we did in the US. Unfortunately, we have always been too PC and lacking in the political “cajones” to stop problems before they are reported with headlines written in human (American) blood. Were it otherwise, the Twin Towers would still be standing and the little matter of 3000 fatalities would not have happened.
We are still too timid in my opinion, but my judgement is “clouded” by working on the pointy end for most of my adult life. YMMV
You must never have travelled through Havana in the 1950s, nor Madrid, Paris, or Lod in the early 1960s.
When I was a young tank crewdawg in Germany in 1967, neither the German cops around Flughafen Frankfurt am Main , nor the Munich, Augsburg or Stuttgart airports, all of which I travelled through as a courier at least monthly and usually weekly. the most usual weapon found on German uniformed cops then was the 7,65mm/ .32 auto Walther PP, the heavier stuff not coming into use until the Communist/Anarchist riots in May 1968. After that some old BGS Beretta machinepistols were hastily pressed into service until new Walther MPL and MPK SMGS were obtained. After the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre, more buzzguns became more common, and 9mm handguns that shared the same ammo came into use, particularly after the Red Terrorists began to be known as *the 9mm gang*.
My memories of 1961 Paris as a kid include the nervous cops with MAT49s at Le Bourget, and the Sherman tanks parked around the Chamber of Deputies just in case the Army paratroopers then in revolt against DeGaulle over French policies on Algeria decided to come a-visiting. But that was nothing real new to me: dad was a senior refinery engineer who'd previously [1958] been assigned to the Caltex/Texaco refinery at Santa Clara, Cuba, during the closing days of the Fidelista revolution. Before things had gotten so sporty, my folks had thought that spending a year in Cuba with my dad would make a great *learning experience;* it was that all right. Three years later, we went through Paris while THEY were in the middle of an equally tense period, and it looked pretty much as if their airport cops had taken lessons from the Cuban airport cops.