A former student at an Austrian high school opened fire on the campus on Tuesday and killed 10 people before apparently killing himself, a rare and shocking episode of the sort of gun violence that is far more common in the United States than in Europe.
The killings in Graz, a wealthy university town that is Austria’s second largest city, were among the worst European school shootings in years. It was the deadliest such attack in memory at an Austrian school, and it profoundly rattled the small Alpine nation.
The Austrian chancellor, Christian Stocker, cleared his schedule to travel to Graz and declared three days of national mourning.
Mr. Stocker, said in a post on social media that “The shooting rampage at a school in Graz is a national tragedy that has deeply shaken our entire country.”
State police said the shooter was a 21-year-old who had previously attended the school, BORG Dreierschützengasse, but never graduated. He killed six females and three males on campus, whom the police did not publicly identify. Another victim, a woman, later died at a hospital. The authorities said they would not release more information on the victims, including how many of them were students, until preliminary investigations had finished.
The shooter was found dead in a school bathroom. The police said he had arrived at the school carrying a pistol and a longer gun — they did not clarify whether it was a shotgun or a rifle — that he had legally bought.
Investigators began gathering evidence on Tuesday and asked for witnesses to upload video or photos to a secure website.
It was the sort of incident that has become a regular occurrence across America in recent years. Every year since 2021, the nonprofit K-12 School Shooting Database has tracked more than 50 school shootings during instructional time in the United States.
Europe’s high-profile school shootings are far less frequent.
They include a seventh-grader who killed eight children in 2023 in Serbia and a teenager who killed 15 people in a rampage that began at a school near Stuttgart, Germany, in 2009.
European nations typically restrict firearm ownership far more than the United States does. Researchers say the lower availability of guns is linked with the lower rate of school shootings on the continent compared with America, though not an ironclad explanation for them.
“There’s a strong correlation between both domestic homicides taking place, nondomestic homicides taking place, and then also mass shootings” and “the availability of firearms,” Marieke Liem, a professor of violence and interventions at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who has extensively studied European gun violence, said in an interview.
“The higher the gun availability, the higher the homicide rate globally,” she said.
Austrian civilians are among the most heavily armed in the world, but still trail the United States significantly on gun ownership, according to data from the Small Arms Survey, an independent research body based in Geneva.
Austrians hold about 2.6 million guns, only about 837,000 of which are registered, according to the survey. Austria ranked 12th in the world in gun holdings per person. That’s about 30 firearms for every 100 civilians. The United States had about 120.5 guns for every 100 people during that same time, the survey showed.
Mass shootings in Austria are rare. Two such incidents occurred between 2000 and 2022, according to an analysis published in 2024 by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a think tank.
In Graz, the police said that they had responded to reports of gunfire in a building at a high school in the north of the city at 10 a.m. local time. The large police response included highly-trained COBRA officers, the Austrian equivalent of the SWAT team and helicopter support.
More than 300 officers were on the scene, along with 160 ambulance and first-aid responders. Evacuation of the school was completed by around 11:30 a.m. A stadium about a mile away was opened as a safe gathering site for students and their parents.
The shootings stunned the city, which has about 300,000 residents, trailing only Vienna for size in Austria. A helicopter circled overhead. Heavily armed officers policed the streets and ambulances raced through with sirens wailing.
Graz last experienced a major mass attack a decade ago. In that incident, a man killed three people and wounded about three dozen others after driving a car into crowds on the streets of the city and then attacking bystanders with a knife.
Ms. Liem, the Dutch violence researcher, said that across European countries, upticks in gun violence can often be traced back “to some sort of criminal activity” like gangs or drug markets. That makes shootings like the one in Graz particularly unusual.
Still, she said, as a researcher, the incident did not surprise her.
“I think such things, horrendous as they may be, they can be explained,” she said. “I think it’s possible to do everything we can to prevent them. But as long as there’s guns, young people, I’d be hesitant to say that we can abolish this phenomenon completely.”
Amelia Nierenberg contributed reporting from London.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Jim Tankersley is the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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