On Tuesday, 10th of June, a former student at a secondary school in Austria’s second largest city, Graz, killed 10 people and himself in the worst school shooting in modern Austrian history, reports Reuters.
Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said that a dozen other people were injured. Austrian media reported that most of the victims were pupils.
Police said they believed that the 21-year-old Austrian, who was found dead in the bathroom, had acted alone. He entered the school with two guns and started shooting. It is still not known why he did this.
Chancellor Christian Stocker called the shooting “dark day in the history of our country”. “There are no words to describe the pain and sadness we are all feeling right now – all of Austria,” he said.
Austria is one of the European countries with the highest number of guns among its civilian population – around 30 per 100 inhabitants, according to the independent research group Small Arms Survey.
MASS SHOOTINGS IN EUROPE ARE RELATIVELY RARE COMPARED TO OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD, MAINLY DUE TO STRICTER GUN CONTROL LAWS AND A DIFFERENT ATTITUDE TOWARDS FIREARMS IN SOCIETY.
Over the past 25 years, Europe has been rocked by a number of horrific mass shootings that have shaken the continent and left lasting scars on the communities affected.
In April 2002, a tragedy occurred in Germany when 19-year-old Robert Steinhauser opened fire at the Gutenberg Gymnasium in Erfurt after refusing to take a math exam. He killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two students and a police officer before taking his own life.
In September 2004, Russia experienced a devastating tragedy when rebels demanding Chechen independence seized School No. 1 in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia. It ended in a mass slaughter in which more than 300 hostages were killed, half of whom were children. Many of the victims were killed when the school was stormed.
In November 2007, Finland was rocked by tragedy when 18-year-old Pekka-Eriks Auvinens opened fire at Jokela High School near Helsinki, killing six students, the school nurse, the principal and then himself.
Less than a year later, in September 2008, the country was rocked by another school shooting when student Matti Saari killed nine students and one staff member at a vocational school before committing suicide.
In March 2009, another deadly attack took place in Germany when a 17-year-old armed man killed 15 people, including students, teachers and passers-by, in an attack that began at a school near Stuttgart and ended in a fatal shootout with police.
In June 2010, Derrick Bird shot and killed 12 people and injured 11 others in Cambria, England, before committing suicide. Just two months later, in Bratislava, Slovakia, an armed man killed six members of a Roma family and another woman, injuring 14 others, before committing suicide.
In April 2011, Tristan van der Vlis opened fire in a shopping centre in the Netherlands, killing six people before committing suicide.
One of the most devastating attacks took place in July 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Norway — eight in a car bombing in Oslo and 69, mostly teenagers, at a youth camp.
In November 2015, Islamist attackers armed with guns and bombs killed 130 people and injured hundreds more in Paris, including 90 victims who were killed in a concert hall.
In July 2016, an 18-year-old German-Iranian man obsessed with mass murder killed nine people in Munich.
In March 2023, another attacker killed six people in a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ church in Hamburg before committing suicide.
Just two months later, a 13-year-old boy shot and killed eight classmates and a security guard at a school in Belgrade, Serbia, and a few days later, another attack took place in a nearby village, killing eight more people. Both shooters were arrested.
In December 2023, a Czech student at Prague University killed 14 people after murdering his father. The shooter, who committed suicide, was also suspected of murdering another man and his two-month-old daughter.
In March 2024, armed men stormed the Crocus City Hall concert hall near Moscow, killing at least 139 people. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. Later, in July 2024, six people were shot dead in a nursing home in Croatia, including the shooter’s mother.
In February 2025, one of the deadliest mass shootings took place in Sweden, when a man killed 11 people, including himself, at an adult education centre.
Prior to this shooting, in 2020, four people were killed and 22 injured in central Vienna when a convicted jihadist opened fire on people. In November 1997, a 36-year-old mechanic killed six people in the town of Mauterndorf before committing suicide.