Just when you thought Turkey (or Türkiye) might get through the rest of 2026 without another school shooting, Tuesday morning happened. A student at Inci Uzmez Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in the Turgutlu district of Manisa province walked up near his own school armed with a shotgun and opened fire, wounding at least eleven people, with two to three left in critical condition depending on which official you ask.
Security footage shows him strolling down an empty street beforehand, rifle in plain view, looking about as unhurried as a guy heading to grab a coffee. He didn’t stay that calm for long. Later footage shows him running from the scene, weapon still in hand, before police caught up with him.
The 15-year-old suspect allegedly took the gun from his grandparents’ house, and his grandfather is the one believed to have held the license for it. The shooter’s mother, father, and grandfather have since been detained as part of the investigation into how a licensed firearm ended up in a teenager’s hands and, more pointedly, why nobody noticed until it was too late.
Turkish officials have promised a thorough look into the weapon’s storage, the parents’ supervision, and the bullying claims already swirling around the case. President Erdoğan even chimed in, promising tighter gun controls while name-checking America as the model he doesn’t want to follow when it comes to mass violence terrorizing a society. That’s a hell of an admission from a country that, until this year, had no real history of school shootings at all.
This is Turkey’s third school shooting of 2026. It’s also Turkey’s third school shooting ever. Two teenagers in April, one in September, and suddenly a country with zero precedent for this kind of violence has racked up as many school shootings in eight months as some American states manage in a bad year. I’m looking at you, Texas. Anyway, something changed in Turkey, and it wasn’t gun availability alone, since their gun laws are still considerably stricter than ours.
No motive has been released yet, but bullying allegations are already floating around, because of course they are. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it until it stops being necessary. The bullied-loner-finally-snaps narrative is mostly myth. In my own research into these cases, the shooters far more often turn out to be the ones doing the bullying, or at least perceiving slights that nobody else witnessed, rather than genuine victims pushed past their limit.
So when “bullying” gets floated this fast, before investigators have even finished their first pass, I start wondering whose definition of bullying we’re actually working with. Is it the dictionary definition, or is it the version that gets passed around in certain corners of the internet where feeling excluded, unpopular, or simply unloved gets rebranded as persecution worth avenging?
Those corners of the internet have names, and I’ve written about them for years. The True Crime Community, or TCC, sounds harmless enough on the surface, but there’s a darker subset within it that doesn’t just discuss killers. It studies them like scripture and starts treating body counts as some kind of leaderboard.
Adjacent to that scene are the Columbiners, named for their obsession with the two shooters at Columbine High School, who get treated less like mass murderers and more like teen hearthrobs.
Both communities blur the line between documenting violence and worshipping it, and both have shown up again and again in the backgrounds of shooters I’ve covered.
That includes the two Turkish shootings from April. The Siverek shooter posted online warnings before his attack, and the Kahramanmaraş shooter had an Elliot Rodger reference sitting right there on his WhatsApp profile, plus a planning document on his computer describing a “major operation” like he was staging his own revolutionary military operation.
Turkish authorities detained over 160 people afterward for glorifying those attacks online, which tells you that the TCC and Columbiner ecosystem isn’t some fringe American export confined to English-language forums. It has a real footprint in Turkey already. I can’t say with certainty that this latest shooter was steeped in that world too, since the investigation is barely underway, but given the pattern set by the last two, I wouldn’t be shocked if he was.
TCC influence or not, all three of these shootings feel like American imports to me, and not just because of the guns. It’s the whole package of the fixation on notoriety, the online communities built around admiring killers instead of mourning victims, and the copycat structure where each attack seems to borrow its blueprint from the last one.
Turkey didn’t invent any of this. It caught it, the same way plenty of other countries have started catching it, like a plague. And it’s not staying contained to one part of the world either. Between Turkey’s three shootings and the recent attack in the Philippines, this year has produced more school shootings globally than I can remember tracking in any previous time. School shootings abroad existed before 2026, sure, but not at this pace and not spreading to countries that used to be able to say it doesn’t happen there.
(Sources)
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