Thailand School Shooting: Teachers, Students Killed

Serbia has already lived through the pattern from Nonthaburi: a child picks up a gun kept at home and opens fire on their own school. The Thailand school shooting that unfolded on Friday, August 7, 2026, at Debsirin Nonthaburi secondary school in Bang Kruai district, northwest of Bangkok, follows that same sequence down to the detail. The attacker was a 14 year old student at the school, and the pistol he used belonged to his grandfather.

According to the Thai police, the boy first killed his grandmother and grandfather at the house where he lived. Their bodies were found later, after investigators were already working two crime scenes. From there he went to the school and opened fire.

Trairong Piwpan, spokesman for the Royal Thai Police, said at least 26 rounds were fired and that another 34 rounds of ammunition were found on the attacker.

Three teachers and three students were killed, and another 15 people were injured.

That figure is the official police version. It was not the only one to come out of Thai institutions on Friday.

Why do the official tallies differ?

Three separate state sources gave three separate casualty counts, and none has been retracted:

• police: six killed at the school, three teachers and three students, with 15 injured
• Health Minister Patana Promphat: 22 injured, nine of them in critical condition, noting that some injuries came not from gunfire but from falls and crowding
• Deputy Interior Minister Polapi Suvunchwi: five teachers dead, plus two victims at the family home

The overall toll therefore ranges from seven to eight dead, depending on which official is cited. The youngest victim was 12 years old. The attacker’s own fate shifted through the day: police first reported he had shot himself, then said he had been hospitalized in serious condition, while some officials claimed he had died in the hospital.

The school is not small. In the 2025 school year it had about 3,100 enrolled students and 147 teachers, and the building sits next to a busy highway, which is why ambulances arrived in convoys and brought traffic to a halt.

One 18 year old student told reporters he did not immediately grasp what he was hearing.

At first I didn’t think it was a gun. There were a lot of shots: bang, bang, bang. Then it went quiet. Then it started again.

Another witness said students locked themselves in a classroom and listened to gunfire from the neighboring building until police knocked on the door and led them outside.

Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul offered condolences to the families and ordered authorities to take care of the victims. The motive, according to Trairong Piwpan, remains under investigation.

The gun that was already in the house

Thailand has strict rules on paper. Illegal weapons possession carries up to ten years in prison, and after previous mass shootings a medical evaluation was made mandatory for anyone buying a firearm or renewing a license. Despite that, estimates put the number of firearms in the country at around 10.3 million, of which roughly 40 percent are unregistered.

This attack falls exactly into the gap none of those rules cover. The grandfather was, according to police, the pistol’s registered owner. The medical evaluation applies to the owner, not to everyone else sleeping in the same house, and the requirement to store a weapon safely is in practice rarely checked.

That is the point where the Thai case matches Serbia’s. In the massacre at Vladislav Ribnikar Elementary School in Belgrade, in May 2023, a 13 year old opened fire with a weapon legally kept in the family apartment. Serbia carried out an amnesty and a mass weapons surrender afterward, but the most contested part, control over how weapons are stored inside a household, remained the weakest link even where the paperwork was in order.

A pattern that keeps repeating

This is not an isolated event in Thai schools and shopping malls. In February 2026 a 17 year old stole a police pistol and opened fire at a secondary school in the south of the country, in a two hour attack that killed one person and wounded two. In 2023 a 14 year old was charged over a shooting at a Bangkok shopping mall. In October 2022 a former police officer killed dozens of people, including children, in a gun and knife attack in Nong Bua Lamphu province.

Each of these cases set off a debate about tightening regulations, and the measures that followed dealt with acquiring weapons, not with the ones already sitting in homes. Two of the last three attacks were carried out by 14 year olds, and the debate now opening in Bangkok this weekend centers on the same gap Belgrade has known since 2023.

Police have not said when they expect the first results of the motive investigation.