Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting

Date: December 14, 2012 • Location: Newtown, United States

A 20-year-old gunman shot twenty children and six adult staff members in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a mass shooting and murder–suicide that occurred on December 14, 2012, at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 26 people—20 first-grade children and six staff members—before killing himself. Lanza had earlier fatally shot his mother at their home before driving to the school, where he forced entry by shooting out a window near the locked front entrance. He was armed with a semi-automatic rifle and two handguns and killed the victims within about five minutes, before shooting himself as police arrived. It is the deadliest mass shooting at a K–12 school in U.S. history and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting by a single perpetrator in the nation.