Austria will strengthen its gun laws following the country’s deadliest school shooting, Chancellor Christian Stocker said in a televised interview on Saturday.
Speaking to ORF radio, Stocker said officials aimed to set stricter eligibility rules for possession and purchase of arms after a 21-year-old Austrian man on Tuesday shot dead ten people at a high school in the city of Graz before killing himself.
The planned measures would look at things such as age requirements and how to treat certain weapons, Stocker said in an excerpt of an interview due to air later in the day.
The cabinet plans to agree on the measures on Wednesday, a spokesperson for the chancellor’s office said.
The proposals include enhancing psychological expertise in schools, increasing police presence there, improving data exchange between authorities and tightening restrictions for individuals deemed to be a risk, newspaper Kronen Zeitung said.
The spokesperson confirmed the details.
Police described the shooter as an introvert and avid player of online shooting games who had largely withdrawn from the outside world before he planned the attack. Authorities have yet to establish what moved him to carry out the shooting.
Graz School Shooting
A former student fatally shot ten people before taking his own life at a secondary school in Graz on Tuesday, marking the deadliest school shooting in Austria’s modern history.
Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said 12 people were also injured in the mass shooting.
‘A Dark Day’
“The rampage at a school in Graz is a national tragedy that has deeply shaken our entire country,” Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said, calling it a “dark day in the history of our country”.
“There are no words for the pain and grief that we all – all of Austria – are feeling right now.”
The killings caused shock and consternation in Austria, a usually peaceful country unaccustomed to multiple fatalities of the kind that occurred in Graz, its second-biggest city.
(With inputs from Reuters)
