How other countries have responded to gun violence, attacks at schools

Here’s how other countries have responded to gun and knife violence at schools.

Britain

In response to a 1987 mass killing in Hungerford, England, in which a gunman killed 16 people, British Home Secretary Douglas Hurd called for an investigation into the gunman’s legal ownership of the guns he used.

The Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988 passed with the backing of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, outlawing semiautomatic weapons and limiting the sales of some shotguns.

A later deadly shooting, this time at a school in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, spurred even tighter gun-control measures and raised questions over how the gunman, described in a Washington Post report from the time as “a strange man, obsessed with young boys and guns,” managed to get permits to own firearms.

The killer, armed with four handguns, fatally shot 16 children and their teacher in what remains Britain’s deadliest mass killing.

Public outrage spurred a grassroots campaign called Snowdrop. Then came the 1997 Firearms Act, which ended up restricting ownership of almost all handguns. Owners surrendered tens of thousands of guns and were given market value for the weapons.

China

Violent crime is relatively rare in China, where guns are largely restricted to the military and the police force and most civilians are prohibited from keeping guns at home. In recent years, a handful of knife attacks at schools have sparked heightened security.

In July 2023, six people, including three children, were killed when a man attacked them at a kindergarten in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

In August 2022, a man attacked a kindergarten in the eastern province of Jiangxi, killing three and injuring six people with a knife.

In April 2021, two children were killed and 16 were injured at a kindergarten stabbing in Beiliu City in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Following the attack, China’s Education Ministry ordered a nationwide security enhancement at kindergartens, elementary and middle schools.

Serbia

Two back-to-back mass killings rocked Serbia in May 2023, one of them at a school where a seventh-grade student opened fire, killing eight children and a security guard, authorities said.

“We will carry out an almost total disarmament of Serbia,” Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told the country in a nationwide address following the attacks. The nation immediately outlined additional gun-control policies, including a two-year moratorium on new permits for small firearms and hunting weapons, and a review of all existing weapons permits within three months.

Vucic pledged to disarm the country, where illegal guns are widespread — a remnant of the wars of the 1990s — but mass killings are relatively rare. Globally, Serbia has the third-highest rate of civilian gun ownership per capita (tied with Montenegro), according to the 2018 Geneva Graduate Institute’s Small Arms Survey. Only Yemen and the United States have more, the survey found.

Following the attacks in Serbia, some critics including opposition parties blamed the government for failing to prevent them. Within days, Education Minister Branko Ruzic resigned.

Serbians voluntarily surrendered tens of thousands of guns during a nationwide two-month amnesty that allowed unregistered weapons to be turned in without consequence.

During the first three days of the amnesty, almost 6,000 unregistered weapons, 300,000 rounds of ammunition, and 470 pieces of mines and explosive devices were handed in, The Washington Post reported.

Brazil

In 2023, Brazil grappled with a spate of attacks at schools, many of them sharing the hallmarks of American mass killings: lone men and boys who idolized hate groups and violence. One gunman, who was then 16 years old, was inspired by the 1999 Columbine shooting in Colorado.

A stark difference, however, between the killings in the United States and Brazil was the relatively narrower access to firearms in Brazil. Oftentimes, the weapons used in attacks were bladed instruments such as knives or machetes.

In the aftermath of a killing at a day-care center in 2023, Brazil conducted an expansive roundup of hundreds of people who were accused of spreading hate speech or otherwise thought to pose a threat to schools. The teenage boy arrested after the Georgia shooting this week had previously been interviewed by law enforcement officers who were investigating threats made online to carry out a school shooting.

Germany

After a teenager went on a shooting rampage in 2009, leaving 15 people dead, some of them at a school, Germany enacted even stricter gun laws than it had before. (Firearm laws were already tightened after another shooting at a school there in 2002.)

German gun laws now include a requirement that aspiring gun owners pass a psychological exam before they are allowed to purchase a firearm.

In 2013, Germany enacted a national gun registry — a highly detailed list of all the nation’s gun owners and their firearms. The registry faced little opposition — even among gun rights groups there. An official from one of Germany’s gun rights groups told The Post at the time: “We are able to go hunting with it. We are able to do our sports with it. So it works.”

Terrence McCoy, Michael Birnbaum, Frances Vinall, Ellen Francis and Vic Chiang contributed to this report.