Eleven students were wounded outside a high school in Manisa on Monday. The attack is not an isolated case: Turkey has now experienced at least three major firearms attacks at schools or in their immediate surroundings in 2026, against a wider background of widespread access to weapons and thousands of incidents of armed violence.
A 15-year-old opened fire with a shotgun near a high school in western Turkey on Monday morning, wounding 11 students, two of them seriously — the latest in a series of school shootings that, until recently, were exceptionally uncommon in the country.
According to T24, the attack occurred at around 07:59 near the İnci Üzmez Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in Turgutlu, Manisa. The initial official count of eight people affected was subsequently revised to 11 wounded, with two reported in serious condition. The 15-year-old suspect was detained, along with his mother, father and grandfather.
Justice Minister Akın Gürlek said investigators were examining how the teenager obtained the weapon, how it had been stored and whether his parents had fulfilled their responsibilities for his care and supervision. Authorities are also investigating allegations that bullying may have preceded the attack.
The Ministry of Education sent three inspectors to Manisa and suspended classes at the school for the day, while psychosocial support teams were deployed for students, teachers and parents.
In a striking coincidence, the shooting came only a day after the Interior and Education ministries signed a new nationwide “School Security Protocol”, involving governors, police chiefs, gendarmerie commanders and provincial education authorities across all 81 provinces.
Not The Second — At Least The Third Major School Shooting This Year
At first glance, the Manisa shooting might appear to be the second major incident of its kind in Turkey. A closer examination of the record, however, reveals two major school shootings on consecutive days in April.
On April 14, a former student armed with a shotgun entered a vocational high school in Siverek, Şanlıurfa. Reuters reported that he wounded 16 people — ten students, four teachers, a police officer and a canteen employee — before killing himself. The motive remained unclear.
Only 24 hours later came a substantially deadlier attack.
On April 15, a 14-year-old eighth-grade student entered Ayser Çalık Secondary School in Maraş carrying weapons belonging to his father, a former police officer. Reuters reported that the teenager opened fire in two classrooms, killing eight students and a teacher and wounding at least 13 others. Authorities said he had brought five firearms and seven magazines to the school.
Subsequent Turkish reporting revised the death toll upward. DHA reported that nine students and mathematics teacher Ayla Kara ultimately died and that 15 students were wounded. The five firearms used in the attack were licensed weapons belonging to the boy’s father.
The Ministry of Education officially confirmed at the time that the attack had been carried out by a student inside the school.
The sequence therefore matters: Siverek on April 14, Maraş on April 15, and Turgutlu on September 22.
The incidents differ substantially in motive, circumstances and casualty levels, and the available evidence does not establish a single explanation connecting them. Yet they raise a common and increasingly difficult question: how are adolescents and young adults obtaining firearms and bringing them into or around schools?
A Much Larger Firearms Problem
School shootings remain unusual in Turkey. Armed violence does not.
One of the country’s most extensive non-governmental datasets comes from the Umut Foundation, which has tracked incidents reported by national and local media since 2014. Its 2025 Armed Violence Map documented 3,422 incidents of armed violence, leaving 2,225 people dead and 3,167 wounded.
According to the foundation, firearms — including handguns and shotguns — were used in 2,784 of those incidents, while knives and other sharp weapons were involved in 638.
The longer-term figures are equally significant. The Umut Foundation recorded 41,420 incidents of armed violence between 2014 and 2025, resulting in 26,029 deaths and 38,203 injuries.
These figures require an important qualification. They are based primarily on systematic monitoring of incidents reported in national and local media rather than a complete official registry of every violent incident in Turkey. They should therefore be understood as documented cases, not necessarily the country’s entire burden of armed violence.
Separate figures concerning illegal weapons underline another dimension of the problem. Umut Foundation data reported in June stated that 110,470 illegal firearms were seized by the authorities during 2025, followed by another 25,580 in the first three months of 2026.
The seizure figures should not be conflated with the armed-violence statistics: they do not establish that the confiscated weapons were used in those incidents, nor do they show how many illegal firearms remain in circulation. What they do demonstrate is the scale at which authorities are encountering unlawfully held weapons.
Taken together, the figures offer a more defensible picture than headline estimates of the total number of guns circulating in Turkey: 3,422 documented armed-violence incidents, 2,225 deaths and 3,167 injuries in 2025, alongside 110,470 illegal firearms reportedly seized during the same year.
These numbers do not establish that widespread gun ownership, by itself, caused the school attacks. They do, however, provide important context for understanding an environment in which firearms — both legally and illegally held — are readily present and thousands of violent incidents involving weapons are documented each year.
The Kahramanmaraş and Turgutlu cases expose another dimension of the problem: storage and access within families. In Kahramanmaraş, the firearms were legally owned by the attacker’s father. In Turgutlu, investigators are examining how a 15-year-old gained access to the shotgun and whether adults responsible for storing it failed in their duties.
Children and Violence
Official statistics concerning children provide another reason for concern, although they must be interpreted carefully and should not be read as suggesting that hundreds of thousands of Turkish children are violent offenders.
According to TÜİK, Turkey’s official statistical institute, children were involved in 609,959 incidents recorded by security services in 2025. Most were not recorded as perpetrators: 267,794 were victims, while 196,308 were processed because they were allegedly “drawn into crime”. Others appeared in the statistics as witnesses, missing children or for other reasons.
The nature of the alleged offences nevertheless deserves attention. Among children processed on suspicion of criminal activity, 41.6% were associated with wounding, compared with 14.7% for theft, 9.7% for drug-related offences and 5.1% for threats. Among children recorded as crime victims, 59.2% were victims of wounding.
These figures portray children not simply as alleged participants in violence but, very often, as its victims.
They also suggest that any discussion triggered by Turkey’s school shootings needs to extend beyond the school gates. Firearm availability is one component. Bullying, interpersonal violence, family supervision, children’s exposure to violence, safe firearm storage and the ability of schools and social services to identify young people at risk are others.
More Than a School-Security Problem
Metal detectors, police patrols and school-security protocols may reduce risks at school entrances. Yet the circumstances emerging from Turkey’s 2026 shootings suggest that the problem begins considerably earlier.
In Siverek, a former student arrived with a shotgun. In Kahramanmaraş, a 14-year-old obtained several legally owned firearms from his family home. In Turgutlu, a 15-year-old allegedly gained access to a family shotgun before going to the vicinity of his school.
That shifts part of the debate from protecting schools from guns to preventing children from gaining access to guns in the first place.
It also places the attacks within wider questions confronting Turkish society: illegal firearms, safe storage of licensed weapons, youth violence, bullying, children’s exposure to violence, family supervision and the capacity of schools and social services to recognise warning signs before violence occurs.
The available evidence does not justify describing Turkey as having developed an American-style school-shooting phenomenon. Three major attacks cannot establish such a trend on their own, and Turkey’s social, legal and firearms environment is different from that of the United States.
What can be said is more limited, but still disturbing: three serious firearms attacks connected to schools have occurred within little more than five months in 2026, two of them on consecutive days.
The Turgutlu investigation may eventually establish an individual motive. The broader question raised by 2026 is whether these incidents are treated solely as separate tragedies or also prompt a deeper examination of how firearms, young people and violence are intersecting in Turkey.
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