The coffins in Kahramanmaras would haunt Turkey for years. Eight children and a teacher were buried after a 14-year-old walked into a middle school with pistols taken from his father and turned classrooms into a killing ground. A country (like many others around the world) that has long treated school shootings as an American sickness now has two in two days. The first, in Sanliurfa, came from a former student with a rifle. The second came from a child who had already left warnings in plain sight.
Turkey is not the United States, where firearm injury was the leading cause of death among children and teens aged 1 to 19 in 2022. School shootings are highly uncommon, let alone occurring in quick succession. Yet the Turkish case still passed through a familiar door, a minor got hold of weapons kept by an adult entrusted with them. The father is in jail pending trial, as he should be. The harder question is why every debate after such bloodshed rushes toward security theatre at school gates while the chain of negligence begins elsewhere. Safe storage, criminal liability for reckless access, mandatory mental health and threat reporting, and real audits for officials entitled to possess weapons should already be on the table. They should be the law.
Police say the boy used an image referencing Elliot Rodger, whose 2014 killings near Santa Barbara became a touchstone for misogynist online subcultures. Brazil saw the same copycat disease in Suzano in 2019. Finland saw a 12-year-old say bullying drove his school shooting in 2024. Serbia learned in 2023 that even a country with tighter formal gun rules can be shattered by one child with access and intent, after which it answered with a weapons crackdown and an amnesty for surrendering illegal arms. Turkey’s instinct, as of now, has been to detain dozens of people for glorifying crime and to block hundreds of accounts. It is never enough.
The government and media should stop writing these episodes as freak ruptures in a healthy order and start reading them as shrill alarm bells from a society. Schools need counsellors, anti-bullying systems, threat assessment units, and a lawful way for students to report danger without being ignored. Similarly, families need to be told that a gun left within reach is not private carelessness. It is public risk. *