On Tuesday, a 19-year-old walked into his former high school in southeastern Turkey with a pump-action shotgun and opened fire in the corridors. By Wednesday morning, an eighth-grader carried five of his father’s guns into a middle school in a neighboring province and did the same thing.

In 48 hours, Turkey experienced two school shootings that left at least 40 people dead or wounded — a pattern the country has almost no precedent for handling.

The deadlier of the two attacks came Wednesday at Ayser Çalık Middle School in the Onikisubat district of Kahramanmaraş. A student, aged 13 or 14, arrived with five firearms and seven magazines that Governor Mukerrem Ünlüer said belonged to his father, a retired police officer. The boy entered two classrooms and opened fire.

Three students and one teacher were killed. Twenty people were injured, four seriously enough to require surgery, according to Ünlüer. The shooter then took his own life.

“A student came to school with guns that we believe belonged to his father in his backpack,” Ünlüer told reporters. “He entered two classrooms and opened fire randomly, causing injuries and deaths.”

A Copycat Pattern, Compressed

Less than 24 hours earlier, at a school in the neighboring province of Şanlıurfa, a 19-year-old named Ömer Ket walked into the Ahmet Koyuncu Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in Siverek. Ket had been expelled from the school in ninth grade but continued with distance learning. He had no criminal record. He arrived around 9:30 a.m. local time with a pump-action shotgun.

CCTV footage showed Ket walking through corridors firing at people, according to Turkish media. Students jumped from windows to escape. By the time the attack ended, 16 people had been injured — ten students, four teachers, one police officer, and a cafeteria worker, according to Turkey’s interior ministry. Ket killed himself with the same weapon when cornered by police.

Şanlıurfa governor Hasan Şıldak described it as a random attack. “Despite taking all necessary precautions regarding the safety of our schools, such isolated incidents can still occur,” he told reporters.

The speed with which the second attack followed the first raises the question of contagion. Research on mass violence has consistently found that one high-profile attack raises the probability of another in the days that follow. Whether coverage of the Siverek shooting gave the Kahramanmaraş attacker a blueprint is unknown — but the timeline fits a pattern well documented in countries where school shootings are more common.

A Country Without a Framework

Turkey has strict gun laws. Licensing, registration, mental health and criminal background checks are all required, and penalties for illegal possession are severe. Yet the Kahramanmaraş shooter’s arsenal — five firearms and seven magazines — belonged to his father, a retired police officer. Legal barriers designed to keep weapons out of children’s hands were bypassed entirely.

School shootings have been rare in Turkey. The most recent notable incident before this week came in May 2024, when a former student killed a 74-year-old private school principal in Istanbul — a killing that prompted thousands of teachers to demonstrate for stronger safety measures. The deadliest school shooting in modern Turkish history was the 2018 Eskişehir University attack, in which a 37-year-old research assistant killed four staff members and wounded three others.

But Turkey has nothing resembling the institutional infrastructure — standardized lockdown protocols, school resource officers, behavioral threat assessment teams — that some countries have developed after repeated mass violence in schools.

The Justice Ministry’s immediate response to Wednesday’s attack was a broadcast ban, imposed “for the sake of the integrity of the investigation,” and the assignment of seven prosecutors. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek announced the investigation in a statement on X.

What Comes Next

The political response from Ankara has so far been limited to condemnations and investigative announcements. No policy changes have been proposed. Governor Şıldak’s insistence that “all necessary precautions” were already in place sits uneasily alongside the fact that an expelled teenager walked into his former school with a shotgun unimpeded — and that the next day, a child barely into his teens did the same thing with five guns.

Footage from Kahramanmaraş showed crowds gathered outside the school, some filming on mobile phones, ambulances pulling away. Turkish broadcaster NTV reported that the gunfire was “very intense” and described “panic in front of the school.”

Turkey is now confronting something it has barely had to reckon with. Two shootings in two days could still be a horrific coincidence. A third would be a crisis the country has no infrastructure to address.

Sources