A former student of an Austrian high school opened fire on the campus on Tuesday and killed 10 people before apparently committing suicide, a rare and shocking episode of the type of armed violence that is much more common in the United States than in Europe.
The murders in Graz, a rich university city that is the second largest city in Austria, were among the worst shootings in the European school in years. It was the deadliest attack in memory in an Austrian school, and the small alpine nation was deeply shook.
The Austrian Foreign Minister, the existing Christian, cleared his schedule to travel to Graz and declared three days of national mourning.
Mr. Stocker, he said in a publication on social networks that “the shooting in a school in Graz is a national tragedy that has the entire country deeply.”
The State Police said the shooter was a 21 -year -old who had previously attended school, Borg Dreierschützengasse, but never graduated. He killed six women and three men on campus, whom the police did not identify publicly. Another victim, a woman, later died in a hospital. The authorities said they would not publish more information about the victims, including how many of them were students, until the preliminary investigations had ended.
The shooter was found dead in a school bath. Police said he had arrived at school carrying a gun and a longer gun, they did not clarify whether it was a shotgun or a rifle, which had bought legal.
The researchers were gathering tests on Tuesday and asked for witnesses to upload videos or photos to a safe website.
It was the type of incident that has become a regular occurrence in America in recent years. Every year since 2021, the non-profit database K-12 Schooting has tracked more than 50 shootings at the school time in the United States.
The high profile school shootings in Europe are much less frequent.
They include a seventh grade student who killed eight children in 2023 in Serbia and a teenager who killed 15 people in a uproar who was in a school near Stuttgart, Germany, in 2009.
European nations generally restrict the property of firearms much more than the United States. Researchers say that the lower arms availability is linked to the lowest school shooting rate in the continent compared to the United States, it did not think it is not an Ironclad explanation for them.
“There is a strong correlation between the domestic homicides that take place, the non -domesticated homicides that take place and then also massive shootings” and “the availability of firearms,” ​​Marieke Liem, a professor of violence and interventions at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, which has extensively studied European armed violence, he said in an interview.
“The higher the availability of weapons, the greater the homicide rate worldwide,” he said.
Austrian civilians are among the most armed in the world, but the United States is still significantly on the property of weapons, according to the data of the Small Weapons Survey, an independent research agency based in Geneva.
The Austrians have around 2.6 million weapons, only around 837,000 or that are registered, according to the survey. Austria occupied 12th position in the world in properties of weapons per person. That is about 30 firearms per 100 civilians. The United States had around 120.5 weapons per 100 people who deepen the survey that same time.
The massive shootings in Austria are rare. Two of these incidents occurred between 2000 and 2022, according to an analysis published in 2024 by the Government Rockefeller Institute, a group of experts.
In Graz, the police said they had responded to shooting reports in a building in a high school in the north of the city at 10 am local time. The great police response included highly trained Cobra officers, the Austrian equivalent of the SWAT team and the support of helicopters.
More than 300 officers were on the scene, along with 160 ambulances and the first help respond. The evacuation of the school was completed around 11:30 am, a stage was opened to a mile away as a safe meeting place for students and their parents.
The shootings surprised the city, which has around 300,000 residents, only Vienna for size in Austria. A helicopter surrounded his head. The strongly armed officers watched the streets and the ambulances ran with sirens that cried.
Mrs. Liem, the Dutch violence researcher, said that in all European countries, those disgusted in armed violence often date back “to some kind of criminal activity” such as gangs or drug markets. That makes the shootings like Graz’s being particularly unusual.
Even so, he said, as a researcher, the incident did not surprise her.
“I think such things, horrendous, can be explained,” he said. “I think it is possible to do everything possible to prevent them. But as long as there are weapons, young people, I would doubt that we can abolish this phenomenon completely.”
