A shootout, also called a firefight, gunfight, or gun battle, is a armed confrontation entailing firearms between armed parties using guns, always entailing intense disagreement(s) between the fighting parties. 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.
On April 4, 1991, 41 employees and customers were taken hostage by four gunmen and held at a Good Guys! electronics store at the corner of 65th Street and Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, California, near the Florin Mall for approximately eight hours. Near the end of the hostage crisis, six were killed: three hostages and three of the four hostage-takers. The fourth hostage-taker was captured by authorities, and an additional 14 hostages were injured during the crisis. To this day, the hostage crisis remains the largest hostage rescue operation in US history, with over 40 hostages having been held at gunpoint.
The Platte Canyon High School hostage crisis was a hostage taking and shooting at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, on September 27, 2006. The gunman, 53-year-old Duane Roger Morrison, took seven female students hostage and sexually assaulted them, later releasing four. When police broke open the classroom's door with explosives, Morrison opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol before shooting hostage Emily Keyes in the head. The other remaining hostages escaped unharmed, and paramedics confirmed that Morrison had committed suicide shortly before police were able to enter the classroom. Keyes was pronounced dead at 4:32 p.m. MDT at Saint Anthony's Hospital in Denver, Colorado, after undergoing emergency surgery.
44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out is a 2003 American crime action docudrama television film directed by Yves Simoneau and written by Tim Metcalfe. The film stars Michael Madsen, Ron Livingston, Mario Van Peebles, Andrew Bryniarski, and Oleg Taktarov. It is a semi-fictional dramatization of the 1997 North Hollywood shootout, and follows the perspectives of bank robbers Larry Eugene Phillips Jr. and Emil Mătăsăreanu, as well as various Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers involved in the shootout.
The Goleta postal facility shootings were a spree killing perpetrated by Jennifer San Marco on January 30, 2006. San Marco, a former United States Postal Service employee, shot and killed six people in Goleta, California, before taking her own life. Prior to the Goleta shooting, she shot and killed a former neighbor in nearby Santa Barbara.
The Tacoma Mall shooting was a mass shooting and attempted mass murder that occurred on November 20, 2005, at the Tacoma Mall in Tacoma, Washington, United States. The gunman, Dominick Maldonado, entered the mall with a semi-automatic Norinco MAK-90 rifle and a pistol, injuring six before he instigated four armed kidnappings.
The Case Western Reserve University shooting took place on May 9, 2003, when Biswanath Halder entered the Peter B. Lewis Building of the Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland, Ohio where he then killed graduate student Norman Wallace and wounded two professors. Halder took people in the building hostage, and they ran and barricaded themselves and hid during the seven hours that the gunman roamed the building, shooting indiscriminately. He was finally apprehended by a SWAT team. Halder was convicted on multiple felony counts and sentenced to life in prison; he lost a 2008 appeal.
On April 3, 2009, a mass shooting occurred at the American Civic Association immigration center in Binghamton, New York. At approximately 10:30 a.m. EDT, Jiverly Antares Wong, a 41-year-old naturalized American citizen who was Ethnically Chinese from Vietnam, entered the facility and killed thirteen people and wounded four others before committing suicide.
On July 26, 2013, a mass shooting occurred at the Todel Apartments, an American apartment complex in Hialeah, a city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States. Seven people, including the shooter, were killed in the incident. The shooter was identified by police as 42-year-old Pedro Alberto Vargas, a resident of Hialeah, who, after setting his apartment ablaze, opened fire from his balcony and inside the apartment, then held two people hostage before being fatally shot by a SWAT team in the early hours of July 27.
On 2 October 2015, Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar, a 15-year-old boy, shot and killed Curtis Cheng, an unarmed police civilian finance worker, outside the New South Wales Police Force headquarters in Parramatta, Sydney, Australia. Jabar was subsequently shot and killed by special constables who were protecting the headquarters. As of 27 April 2016, four other men have been charged in relation to the shooting, among whom Raban Alou was convicted of terrorism offences in March 2018.
The 1996 Honolulu hostage crisis occurred on February 6, 1996, in Sand Island, Honolulu, Hawaii, when 28-year-old John Miranda took hostages at the Seal Masters of Hawaii building, his former place of employment. During the hostage crisis, two hostages were injured, one seriously. Miranda was the only fatality during the crisis itself. However, a few weeks after the event, he was found to have murdered his former girlfriend prior to the crisis.
The Resorts World Manila attack was an attack that took place at the Resorts World Manila entertainment complex in Newport City, Pasay, Philippines. 38 were killed and 70 were injured when a gunman caused a stampede after he set fire to casino tables and slot machine chairs around midnight on June 2, 2017. The gunman moved to a storage area to steal casino chips from the venue but later committed suicide following a confrontation with the responding police. Nearly all of the attack's deaths and injuries resulted from the initial stampede and smoke inhalation from the fire.
On July 16, 2014, three armed suspects robbed a Bank of the West branch in Stockton, California. After taking three hostages, the suspects fled the scene, pursued by officers of the Stockton Police Department (SPD) in an hour-long pursuit that ended in a shootout. Over the course of the incident, almost 1,000 rounds were exchanged between police and the suspects.
On July 21, 2018, a hostage incident occurred at a Trader Joe's store in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. 28-year-old Gene Evin Atkins, armed and fleeing police, crashed into a utility pole and ran into the nearby store. He fired at two pursuing police officers during the pursuit and after the crash; the two officers returned fire in Atkins's direction, hitting and killing a store employee, Melyda Corado, and hitting Atkins in the left arm. After escaping into Trader Joe's, Atkins barricaded himself and the rest of the store's patrons and employees inside the store. By the end of the incident, Atkins was arrested for various criminal felonies.
On November 19, 2018, a mass shooting took place at the Mercy Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois. An attending physician at the hospital, a police officer, and a pharmacy resident were killed. The gunman, later identified as Juan Lopez, the ex-fiancé of one of the victims, later died in a shootout with other responding officers.
On January 23, 2019, at around 12:30 pm, five women – four employees and a customer – were shot and killed at the SunTrust Bank in Sebring, Florida. Zephen Xaver, aged 21, surrendered and was arrested at the scene by police after a standoff and the deployment of a SWAT team. He initially pleaded not guilty to five murders. On March 14, 2023, he pleaded guilty in the shooting.
On March 2, 2020, 40-year-old Archie Paray, who worked as a security guard at the Greenhills shopping mall complex in Greenhills, San Juan, Metro Manila, the Philippines, took 55 people hostage at the administration office on the second floor of the Virra Mall. Paray was an employee of the mall's security agency, Safeguard Armor Security Corporation (SASCOR), and believed he was a subject of unjust termination. During the standoff, Paray demanded the authorities to air his grievances against his former employers. Only one person was injured during the incident, and Paray was arrested after he freed the hostages.
The Colleyville synagogue hostage crisis was a 2022 incident where a 44-year-old man armed with a pistol took four people hostage in a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, in the United States.
On June 1, 2022, Michael Louis opened fire in the Natalie Building, part of the Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States. He killed four people, three of whom were hospital staff, and injured an unspecified number of others before committing suicide.
