2012 Aurora theater shooting
mass shooting in a movie theater in the United States
On July 20, 2012, a mass shooting occurred inside a Mershops Town Center Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, United States, during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises. 24-year-old James Eagan Holmes set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple firearms. Twelve people were killed and 70 others were injured, 58 of them due to gunfire. Holmes' shooting remains the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in Colorado's history.
Holmes was arrested minutes later in his car outside the cinema. Earlier, he had rigged his apartment with homemade explosives and incendiary devices. These were defused by the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office Bomb Squad a day after the shooting.
Fearing copycat crimes, movie theaters showing the same film across the United States increased their security. Gun sales increased in Colorado, and political debates were generated about gun control in the United States.
Holmes confessed to the shooting but pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
“2012 Aurora theater shooting” enters the record as mass shooting in a movie theater in the United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Aurora, theater and shooting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q202512. Authority coordinates are 39.706, -104.821. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “2012 Aurora theater shooting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.