A 16-year-old former student attempted a rampage school shooting at Welfen-Gymnasium Secondary School in Schongau, Germany at 12:50pm today. This small town of 12,000 residents is about 40 miles outside of Munich.
The school is part of a multi-building and multi-level school campus that sits directly next to the town’s hospital.
When the surprise attack started, the teen’s gun immediately malfunctioned. He then stabbed or slashed two 13-year-old girls with a knife. Within seconds, he was overpowered by a teacher and fled from the building. Both girls were wounded with non-life-threatening injuries (and I’d assume they received very prompt medical care with the hospital next door).
Police believe that the girls were random victims who were in the path of the assailant and they were not specifically targeted.
This attack highlights multiple aspects that are common across school shootings in the United States:
Most take place in small communities and rural areas
Most are committed by current or former students at the school
Even during carefully planned attacks, kids who aren’t familiar with firearms usually kill 0 victims (inversely, the school shootings with the highest number of victims were committed by students whose primary family activity was shooting/hunting)
Attacks involving knives are rarely fatal and rarely have multiple victims
Unarmed students or staff members stopped the attack
Assailant fled from the school before police arrived
What’s very strange about this attack in Germany is the teenage perpetrator used a knife when his gun failed. It’s very difficult for anyone, especially a teenager, to actually harm another person even when they have fanaticized for months or years about their school shooting plot.
Teens who commit school shootings rarely fire at victims when they come face-to-face with their classmates. Most school shootings involve assailants firing into darkened classrooms, shoot students in the back who are running away, or fire down hallways at targets in the distance, so they are shooting at silhouettes rather than people with faces.
Stabbing someone is usually a highly personal interaction due to the proximity of the attacker and victim. When neither of the girls sustained serious injuries, the 16-year-old assailant may have been hesitant about forcefully stabbing the victims before he fled from the building.
This school shooting comes only a week after six people were fatally shot at a women’s care center in Stade, Germany. The shooting stemmed from a custody dispute between the 45-year-old male shooter and the mother of their child who were both staying in the shelter. All six of the victims were employees at the facility.
Over the next week, I’m sure we will learn more about the online activity of the 16-year-old who committed the attack today. Two weeks ago, a school shooting in the Philippines was committed by two students who were radicalized by the same online groups connected to school shootings in the United States. Also this week, Canada has sued OpenAI for ChatGPT’s conversations with the teenage British Columbia school shooter.
About 87% of teens (16-19) in Germany are active users of ChatGPT so there is a very high probability the teen who committed the attack today was an active user. I’ll keep you updated as I learn more.
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.