Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting
2012 school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, United States
On December 14, 2012, a mass shooting occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, United States. The perpetrator, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, shot and killed 26 people. The victims were 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members. Earlier that day, before driving to the school, Lanza fatally shot his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza killed himself with a gunshot to the head. The incident is the second-deadliest school shooting in US history behind the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, and the deadliest to occur at both a K-12 and an elementary school in the United States.
The shooting prompted renewed debate about gun control in the United States, including proposals to make the background check system universal, and for new federal and state gun legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain types of semi-automatic firearms and magazines which can hold more than ten rounds of ammunition.
A November 2013 report issued by the Connecticut State Attorney's office stated that Lanza acted alone and planned his actions, but provided no indication of why he did so, or why he targeted the school. A report issued by the Office of the Child Advocate in November 2014 released that Lanza had Asperger's syndrome and, as a teenager, suffered from depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anorexia, but concluded that these factors "neither caused nor led to his murderous acts". The report went on to say, "his severe and deteriorating internalized mental health problems [...] combined with an atypical preoccupation with violence [...] (and) access to deadly weapons [...] proved a recipe for mass murder."
Background
As of November 30, 2012, 456 children were enrolled in kindergarten through fourth grade at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting” as 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, United States. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q906933. The Library of Congress control number is sh2013002114. Authority coordinates are 41.420, -73.279. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2007, 2013 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sandy Hook Elementary School 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.