Just a couple of days ago, there was a school shooting in Graz, Austria. Just 150km from Vienna. I live in Austria and grew up in Germany. But I often watched media in the USA as a kid, and I directly see the differences in how a mass-shooting gets treated here compared to USA.

First of all: in German-speaking Europe it‘s pretty easy to get a gun, not like many people say that the gun-laws are strict, they are not. U just need a license that u can get by giving the Gun management office ur criminal record and some money. After that u can buy a gun, which often aren‘t even that expensive. That shootings are happening more in the US, than here is a societal problem, caused by male-loneliness in USA being much much more common than in German-speaking Europe.

While in the US after a shooting happens they blame the victim for his „toxic masculinity“ caused by him being lonely due to his creepy appearance, in Austria I heard talks that went something like this „OK, this guy fell out of all social institutions. We can never completely avoid this, but what can we do to decrease the probability of this happening?“. Also Austrian government wants to put more effort to create Jobs for psychologists focusing on male mental health. While in the US? Nobody cares about mental health.

Peoples reactions where also a lot different. While in the US everybody is shocked and sad when a shooting happened, it was a bit different here. In Austria most people were indeed shocked and sad, but u also saw a lot of people being like „ok it happened, but theres nothing I could do about it“. Some where like „ok lets donate blood for the patients in Hospital“ and u also saw some kids and young people smiling, cause they where happy that they don‘t have school for a couple of days (school in Europe is btw not compareable to USA, it is downright awful. Most schools don‘t have flushing toilets, no air conditioner and teachers don‘t care if someone gets bullief, cause they are happy when they don‘t get threatened by the students after calling someones parents or after giving a bad grade).

There were also 2 interesting details about this shooting that get very rarely mentioned: 6 out of the 10 people he shot were female and nearly all of the injured were female. 6-7 (different sources) out of the dead were Slavic (mostly Ex-Yu). This incident was probably racially and anti female oriented. If a student in the US would shoot mostly female Hispanic immigrants it would make big headlines, not so much here.

What‘s ur thought on this?