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Ten people were killed on Tuesday in a mass shooting<\/a> at a high school in Graz, Austria. The gunman, a former student, was also found dead, in an apparent suicide, the police said.<\/p>\n It was the deadliest attack<\/a> in recent Austrian history and one of the deadliest recent school shootings in Europe.<\/p>\n The Austrian chancellor, Christian Stocker, called the shooting a \u201cnational tragedy<\/a>\u201d and declared three days of mourning.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Officials said that the gunman, 21, opened fire on Tuesday morning at BORG Dreiersch\u00fctzengasse, where he was a former student. He was found dead in a school bathroom. The police have not released the suspect\u2019s name.<\/p>\n The police said they received reports of a shooting around 10 a.m. on Tuesday and responded with heavy force. Specially trained COBRA units \u2014 Austria\u2019s version of SWAT teams \u2014 arrived at the scene, as did a police helicopter. More than 300 officers responded.<\/p>\n The school was evacuated in the late morning, with students sent to a nearby stadium. <\/p>\n Austrian schools were closed on Monday for the Pentecost holiday, so students had just returned to classes after a long weekend.<\/p>\n Austrian officials said that six of those killed on campus were female and three were male. Another victim, a woman, later died at a hospital. Authorities said they would not release more information on the victims until preliminary investigations were finished.<\/p>\n The police said the gunman attended the school but did not graduate. He arrived there on Tuesday armed with a pistol and a longer weapon; the police did not clarify whether it was a shotgun or a rifle. Officials said he had acquired the weapons legally.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There were two mass shootings in Austria between 2000 and 2022, both since 2010, according to an analysis<\/a> published in 2024 by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, a think tank based in Albany, N.Y. During that period, there were 109 mass shootings in the United States, according to the institute\u2019s records.<\/p>\n Graz, Austria\u2019s second-largest city after the capital, Vienna, last experienced a mass attack<\/a> in 2015, when a man with a history of domestic violence <\/span>drove a car into crowds<\/a> and then attacked bystanders with a knife. Three people were killed.<\/p>\n Austria has also had terrorism-related violence in the past few years.<\/p>\n In 2024, security officials thwarted a plot<\/a> to attack people at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. In 2020, a gunman killed four people<\/a> and wounded 23 others in Vienna. The man had previously been arrested on suspicion of trying to join ISIS.<\/p>\n Austrian civilians are among the most heavily armed in the world, according to a 2017 estimate from the Small Arms Survey<\/a>, a research group based in Geneva.<\/p>\n At the time, Austria ranked 12th in the world in gun holding per person, the data show. Austrians held about 2.6 million guns, according to the survey<\/a>, or about 30 firearms for every 100 civilians. The United States then had about 120.5 guns for every 100 people, the survey showed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Aaron Karp, a senior consultant at the Small Arms Survey, said in a phone interview that there were 1.4 million registered firearms in Austria as of early 2023, citing data provided by the Austrian government. <\/p>\n \u201cAustria, in many respects, has just been extremely lucky,\u201d said Mr. Karp, <\/span>who described the country as having both \u201ca strong gun culture\u201d and \u201crelatively low homicide figures.\u201d<\/p>\nWhat happened?<\/h2>\n
What\u2019s known about the suspect and the victims?<\/h2>\n
How rare are mass shootings in Austria?<\/h2>\n
Are guns common in Austria?<\/h2>\n