"The Bell for Recess": School Shooting in Austria Ends in Tragedy

The school year in Austria was interrupted not by the usual bell, but by a burst of automatic gunfire: in one of Graz’s schools, a student opened fire on his classmates and teachers. According to the Kronen Zeitung newspaper, at least 10 people fell victim to the tragedy, with around 30 more injured. The shooter himself was found dead in a school restroom — Austria’s Interior Ministry suspects suicide.

While officials discuss how “something like this could happen here,” the details of the story paint a picture so familiar that one wants to ask: are you sure you haven’t seen this plot before? Local media report that the attacker had repeatedly complained about bullying — or, in modern terms, school bullying. Still, until disaster truly strikes, adults are usually concerned with anything but children’s anxieties: reports, reports on completed reports, and ceremonial speeches about a “healthy atmosphere in educational institutions.”

What happened in Graz is not just a tragedy, but a diagnosis of a system where psychologists are there mostly for show, and the principal’s office is the last stop in the complaint book, after which people are usually advised to “tighten the belt of patience.” Austrian society, like any other that prefers to believe in the fairy tale of its own exceptionalism, is now forced to look at itself in the school’s crooked mirror: how many actually noticed the warning signs?

We can only hope that this cruel lesson will not go unheeded. Although, judging by the experience of other countries, textbooks on safety and empathy are often recycled for scrap paper as early as the following year.