Austria Moves to Tighten Gun Laws After Deadly School Shooting

The Austrian government on Wednesday proposed a bundle of new laws on private gun ownership, eight days after the deadliest school shooting in the country’s history.

The measures include raising the minimum age to own some firearms, including handguns, to 25 from 21, strengthening the mandatory psychological test that must be passed to buy a gun and instituting a four-week waiting period between the purchase and the delivery of a first weapon.

The government also wants to make it easier for the results of psychological evaluations to be more easily shared among government agencies.

“Nothing we do, including what we have decided today, will bring back the 10 people we lost last Tuesday,” Chancellor Christian Stocker of Austria said. “We are painfully aware of this. But I can promise you one thing: We will learn from this tragedy,” he added.

The suspect in the shooting, who the police said had been found dead in an apparent suicide, was a 21-year-old former student of the school who had dropped out; his identity has not been disclosed because of Austrian privacy laws. Nine students and a teacher died in the attack. The motive is unclear, but the police have confirmed the suspect’s fascination with past school shootings and his reverence for their perpetrators.

The man failed the psychological test required as part of the assessment for military service, and those who knew him described him as conspicuously antisocial. Yet he was able to buy the guns that he used — a Glock pistol and a shotgun that he had modified — legally.