The Columbine High School massacre, commonly referred to as Columbine, was a school shooting and attempted bombing that occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States. The perpetrators, twelfth-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered twelve students and one teacher. Ten of the twelve students killed were in the school library, where Harris and Klebold subsequently committed suicide. Twenty-one additional people were injured by gunshots, and gunfire was also exchanged with the police. Another three people were injured trying to escape. The Columbine massacre was the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history, until it was surpassed by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, and later the Uvalde school shooting in May 2022, and the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history until the Parkland high school shooting in February 2018. Columbine still remains both the deadliest mass shooting and the deadliest school shooting to occur in the U.S. state of Colorado.
The Erfurt massacre was a school shooting that occurred on 26 April 2002 at the Gutenberg-Gymnasium, a secondary school in Erfurt, Germany. 19-year-old expelled student Robert Steinhäuser shot and killed 16 people, including 13 staff members, two students, and one police officer before committing suicide. One person was also wounded by a bullet fragment. According to students, he ignored them and aimed only for the teachers and administrators, although two students were unintentionally killed by shots fired through a locked door.
A shell, in a military context, is a projectile whose payload contains an explosive, incendiary, or other chemical filling. Originally it was called a bombshell, but "shell" has come to be unambiguous in a military context. A shell can hold a tracer.
A shootout, also called a firefight, gunfight, or gun battle, is a combat situation between armed parties using guns. The term can be used to describe any such fight, though it is typically used in a non-military context or to describe combat situations primarily using firearms.
Emsdetten is a town in the district of Steinfurt, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
The Cologne school massacre was a mass murder that occurred at the Catholic elementary school located in the suburb of Volkhoven in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany, on 11 June 1964. The perpetrator, Walter Seifert, also known as "Der Feuerteufel von Volkhoven", attacked the people at the school with a home-made flamethrower and a spear, killing eight pupils and two teachers, and wounding twenty-two others. When police arrived at the scene, Seifert fled from the school compound and poisoned himself. He was taken to a hospital, where he died the same evening.
The Zug massacre took place on 27 September 2001 in the city of Zug in the canton's parliament. Friedrich Leibacher shot dead 14 people before killing himself. Leibacher was armed with a civilian version of a Stgw 90, a SIG Sauer pistol, a pump-action shotgun, and a revolver, and wore a homemade police vest.
The Winnenden school shooting occurred on the morning of 11 March 2009 at the Albertville-Realschule, a secondary school in Winnenden, southwestern Germany, followed by a shootout at a car dealership in nearby Wendlingen. The shooting spree resulted in 16 deaths, including the suicide of the perpetrator, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer, who had graduated from the school a year earlier. Nine people were injured during the incident.
The Eppstein school shooting was a school shooting that occurred on 3 June 1983 at the Freiherr-vom-Stein Gesamtschule in Eppstein-Vockenhausen, West Germany. The gunman, 34-year-old Karel Charva, fatally shot three students, a teacher and a police officer and injured another 14 people using two semi-automatic pistols, before committing suicide.
The Ansbach school attack occurred on 17 September 2009 at the Gymnasium Carolinum, a secondary school in Ansbach, a town of some 40,000 inhabitants in Bavaria, Germany. The attacker was armed with Molotov cocktails and an axe. Fifteen people were injured in the attack, two of them severely. The attacker was also injured. Police arrived on the scene shortly after the attack began, shot the attacker, and took him into custody.
The Euskirchen court shooting was an act of mass murder that occurred at the district court in Euskirchen, Germany on March 9, 1994. Just after his appeal against a sentence for assaulting his former girlfriend, Vera Lamesic, had ended with an upholding of his conviction, 39-year-old Erwin Mikolajczyk re-entered the court building armed with .45-caliber Colt pistol and a homemade bomb in a backpack. In the hallway he approached Lamesic, hugged her, then fatally shot her, two women who had accompanied her, as well as two other people, and then entered the court room where he killed 33-year-old Alexander Schäfer, the judge who had convicted him. When he ran out of ammunition, Mikolajczyk killed himself by detonating the bomb. A total of eight people were also wounded in the attack.
On 5 February 1992, there was a mass shooting at the Sean Graham bookmaker's shop on the Lower Ormeau Road in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), a loyalist paramilitary group, opened fire on the customers with an assault rifle and handgun, killing five civilians and wounding nine. The shop was in a Catholic and Irish nationalist area and all of the victims were local Catholics. The UDA claimed responsibility using the cover name "Ulster Freedom Fighters", saying the shooting was retaliation for the Teebane bombing, which had been carried out by the Provisional IRA less than three weeks before. A later investigation by the Police Ombudsman found that the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had engaged in "collusive behaviour" with UDA informers involved in the attack.
On June 13, 2015, 35-years-old James Lance Boulware shot at the Dallas Police Department from an armored van with what appeared to be a semi-automatic rifle. The shooting occurred at the department's headquarters in the Cedars neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. He then led the police in a chase to nearby Hutchins, where he remained in the van in a standoff with police. The standoff ended when a police sniper fired a round from a .50-caliber rifle, disabling the engine block, as well as additional rounds into the vehicle to kill the driver. After sending in robots to confirm the shooting and attempt to make entry into the vehicle, water charges were used to breach the windshield. Police then verified that the suspect was the only person in the vehicle and that he was dead. Police also found four bags outside of the police headquarters containing pipe bombs.
On July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed and shot police officers in Dallas, Texas, killing five, injuring nine others, and wounding two civilians. Johnson, a 25-year-old Army Reserve Afghan War veteran, was angry over police shootings of black men. He shot the officers at the end of a protest against the recent killings by police of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.
On 22 July 2016, a mass shooting occurred in the vicinity of the Olympia shopping mall in the Moosach district of Munich, Germany. An 18-year-old Iranian-German, David Sonboly, opened fire on fellow teenagers at a McDonald's restaurant before shooting at bystanders in the street outside and then in the mall itself. Nine people were killed, and 36 others were injured, four of them by gunfire. Sonboly then hid nearby for more than two hours, and killed himself by a self-inflicted gunshot wound when confronted by police.
On 19 June 2017, a car loaded with guns and explosives was rammed into a convoy of Gendarmerie vehicles on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, France. The driver, identified as Djaziri Adam Lotfi was killed as a detonation clouded the car in orange smoke. The attacker had been on terrorism watchlists for Islamic extremism since 2014, and pledged his allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before the attack. In a letter to his family he stated that for years he had supported "the Mujahedeen who fight to save Islam and the Muslims," having practiced shooting "to prepare for jihad," and stated that the attack should be treated as a "martyrdom operation."
The Columbine effect is the legacy and impact of the Columbine High School massacre, which occurred on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado. The shooting has had an effect on school safety, policing tactics, prevention methods, and inspired numerous copycat crimes, with many killers taking their inspiration from Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold by describing the two perpetrators as being martyrs or heroes.
The Halle synagogue shooting occurred on 9 October 2019 in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, and continued in nearby Landsberg. After unsuccessfully trying to enter the synagogue in Halle during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the attacker, 27-year-old Stephan Balliet, fatally shot two people nearby and later injured two others. Federal investigators called the attack far-right and antisemitic terrorism.
The Heidelberg University shooting occurred on 24 January 2022, when an 18-year-old male student, Nikolai G., opened fire on a crowd during an ongoing lecture in Heidelberg University in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, killing one student and injuring three others. The shooter then fled the scene and later committed suicide by shooting himself.
