A mass shooting Wednesday, in which eight students and a security guard were killed at a school in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, was a reminder that such attacks are far less common outside the United States.
“Something like this has never been recorded in the history of Belgrade schools,” said Milan Nedeljkovic, mayor of the city’s Vracar district.
Serbs are known to have stockpiles of weapons left over from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and there have been other mass shootings in the country. In 2013, a veteran of the Balkan wars shot and killed 13 people in a village near Belgrade. In 2007, a man fatally shot nine people in the village of Jabukovac, in eastern Serbia.
But the US, with its high rate of gun ownership, remains an outlier when it comes to gun violence. From 1966 to 2012, Americans accounted for 31% of the attackers in mass shootings worldwide, according to a 2016 study by Adam Lankford, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Alabama. The study found that among countries with more than 10 million people, only Yemen had a higher rate of mass shootings per capita.
Researchers who support gun rights have disputed Lankford’s findings, but he has said that when it comes to cases involving lone gunmen committing random acts of violence, the United States accounts for more than six times its global share, relative to population size.
Here is a list of some recent shootings outside the US that were carried out by lone gunmen.
- Nong Bua Lam Phu, Thailand, 2022 -
A police officer who had recently been fired killed 36 people, including 24 children, at a government-run day care facility, the deadliest shooting by a sole perpetrator in Thailand’s history. The gunman then fatally shot himself at his home.
- Nova Scotia, Canada, 2020 -
In the worst mass shooting in Canada’s history, a gunman killed 22 people in a rural community in Nova Scotia. The massacre began in Portapique, a village of about 100 residents on the Bay of Fundy and ended more than 13 hours later at a gas station in Enfield, 55 miles away, with the gunman shot dead by police. Two weeks after the shooting, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced a ban on military-style assault weapons.
- Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand, 2020 -
A gunman killed 29 people in the northeastern province of Nakhon Ratchasima, also called Korat. After 18 hours, police shot him dead as he hid in a seven-story shopping mall.
- Christchurch, New Zealand, 2019 -
Fifty-one Muslims were killed at two mosques, in a massacre that the gunman broadcast live on the internet after publishing a white supremacist manifesto online. In 2021, a judge sentenced the gunman, an Australian, to life in prison without any chance of parole. He was the first criminal in New Zealand to receive such a sentence.
- Norway, 2011 -
A lone political extremist bombed a government centre in Oslo before heading to an island summer camp for young members of the governing Labor Party, where he shot 69 people. In total, 77 people were killed in the two attacks.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
