School Shootings Aren't Supposed to Happen Here
This wasn’t covered in any of my teacher training courses
This is a tough one to write.
I thought we were safe from anything like this happening here in Austria.
I was back in the classroom last week, just my second time in the past three-plus years. It was a challenging week, mainly because I was trying to corral 26 eight-year-olds, only a handful of whom knew a smattering of English. It was an immersive English week in a school outside Vienna, and the kids needed to be ready to act as teachers and teach their parents something about animals during the Thursday afternoon school festival.
I was too busy stressing out over how to get them to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time so they would have enough English to not make me look bad in front of their parents.
Not until after school got out on Tuesday did the news filter through: there was a school shooting in Graz, Austria’s second largest city, some 200km from Vienna.
Naturally the headlines in the English-speaking press were enough to cause alarm for any friends or family members seeing the news.
It turned out to be the worst shooting in modern Austrian history – 11 dead, including the gunman.
I thought these things only happened in the US.
Before anyone lashes out and berates me for forgetting history, I am well aware of school shootings in the UK and Europe. The earliest I remember most vividly was Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, with 18 killed (including the gunman) and 15 injured. Since then, some internet research shows quite a few more incidents that I needed to be reminded of: Erfurt, Germany, 2002 (17 killed); Jokela, Finland, 2007 (9); Kauhajoki, Finland, 2008 (11); Winnenden, Germany, 2009 (16); Belgrade, Serbia, 2023 (10); Prague, Czechia (at a university) 2023 (15); Örebro, Sweden, 2025 (11).
I realise this sounds so callous when throwing around mere numbers, but I’m just trying to get a sense of the sheer scale. The numbers of incidents and casualties pale in comparison to the US, and there’s also a noticeable gap in Europe between 2009 – 2023 (in those years, there were some shootings, with 1 or 2 casualties; I’ve also left out figures for Russia, where there have been a significant number of shootings and attacks – feel free to draw your own conclusions there).
What to do on Wednesday morning then? Business as usual? Back to all the fun and games and classroom chaos?
Not quite. The kids had questions and their regular classroom teacher and I gave them all the time they needed to process and talk it out. It was done mostly in German, but there were questions especially for me, the most common being, “Doesn’t this happen a lot in America?”
I had a message from my daughter’s school (she’s in first grade). All the teachers planned to talk about it with their classes, and my daughter also had loads of questions for me.
‘Daddy, why did that man shoot those teenagers in Graz, was he crazy?’
‘Sweetheart, I have no idea, nobody does, we have to wait and find out more later. Let’s not rush to conclusions.’1
Nothing really prepares you for moments like this. We weren’t trained for crisis management and psychological support. Thankfully I’m a sympathetic human being, confident in the way I talk to children (when I’m not being silly or sarcastic), but this is something else altogether.
My first time
7 July 2005: four suicide bombers struck London's transport network, killing 52 people and injuring over 770 others.
I was teaching for the first time, in a summer school just outside London. It was only my third week of teaching, and here I was with a group of Spanish and Italian teenagers, who were scared, the more so because their parents were panicking from far away. We had an excursion planned for that afternoon in London.
This was all happening during class. We put aside whatever grammar exercises we were doing and talked about it. They had lots of questions. September 11 was fresh enough in our minds. I told them about that morning, when I was working in the John Hancock tower, the second tallest building in Boston, and my girlfriend was in the tallest, the Prudential, with rumours flying about – definitely no pun intended – that planes were heading our way. Remember, kids, not many people had phones at the time (I didn’t) and it wasn’t easy to get in touch with anyone.
It hits different when you’re a teacher…and a parent…and when it happens at school
I was at university when Dunblane happened. Columbine was three years later. These were both hard to process. Pre-social media news was a different kettle of fish. We had more time to ruminate with less information at our fingertips and none of the nastiness and false rumours of what people were spewing online.
Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut, 2012. I’d been a teacher for 7 years at this point. When you’re surrounded by kids day in and day out, these things impact you so much more. My heart ached for days. Just trying to grasp what parents and teachers and friends were going through was unimaginable.
Parkland High School, Florida, 14 February 2018.
The day after my daughter was born.
When you’re a parent these things hit so much harder.
Back to the future
Austria is safe, isn’t it?
As a parent, I have enough anxiety as it is in general. We left Ukraine and we don’t live anywhere near the US, so my daughter has nothing to worry about, right?
Right?
A couple of friends in the US have told me about their kids coming home from school terrified and in tears after doing active shooter drills. I’ve heard about metal detectors and the clear backpack rules. Every time I hear these tales I think, ‘thank goodness my daughter is safe here in Europe.’
Back to reality
Thursday’s festival was a shambles. The kids were lovely and great fun, but I can’t say much English was learned and I don’t think the parents were impressed, although the feedback was great (I mean, hell, I act like a clown in the classroom and entertain the kids, so I may be good for business even if I haven’t a clue how to actually teach them anything).
I don’t really have a proper conclusion here. I’m just going to let this tail off.
I’ll try to do better the next time.
As I write this, this is what we know: the gunman was a 21-year-old Austrian man who had attended the school but didn’t graduate. There are unconfirmed reports from his farewell letter to his mother that he had been the victim of bullying. He had also applied to join the Austrian Armed Forces but was rejected due to being ‘mentally unfit.’
This is a sobering piece. I'm not a parent but the pain, grief and worry is obviously understandable. I have a deep respect for teachers. Most adults recall transformational experiences with their teachers as do I. Keep doing what you do and thank you for your service.
As a 20+ year educator in the US, nothing gets my cortisol spiking quite like the times that I have been responsible, as a school principal, for organizing and enacting active shooter/lockdown drills during the school day. No matter how many times I had to run them (at least four per school year), and how much self-talk of, "This is just a drill," I would repeat in my head, it always felt far too (sur)real. Walking around in a silent school after just having announced the drill over the PA system, jiggling door handles to ensure that teachers had locked themselves in, checking for any students in bathroom or hallways that may have gotten closed out of their classroom, looking into doorway windows to see if I could catch a glimpse of any students who weren't out of the line of sight - it really is the most sobering, intense thing we do here in the US. And sadly it is for too normal.
As you said, the worst part of all of it when there is an actual shooting here is how quickly we move on and get back to "normal" across the country. None of it is normal, and yet we just keep going. I'm so sorry you have had your feelings of safety shattered and have had to even consider how to answer those questions from your daughter. It's a feeling I wish on nobody, and it's something I fear we will never be able to fix in the States.