On December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza kills 20 first graders and six school employees before turning a gun on himself. Earlier that day, he killed his mother at the home they shared.

The Sandy Hook shooting was, at the time, the second-deadliest mass shooting in the United States after the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, in which a gunman killed 32 students and teachers before committing suicide.

Shortly after 9:30 a.m., 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot through a plate-glass window next to Sandy Hook’s locked front entrance in order to gain access to the school. Hearing the noise, the school principal and school psychologist went to investigate and were shot and killed by Lanza, who was armed with a semiautomatic rifle, two semiautomatic pistols and multiple rounds of ammunition. Lanza also shot and wounded two other Sandy Hook staff members.

He then entered two first-grade classrooms, where he gunned down two teachers and 15 students in one room and two teachers and five students in the other room. The children Lanza murdered, 12 girls and 8 boys, were 6 and 7 years old. Twelve first-graders from the two classrooms survived.

When Lanza heard the police closing in on him, he killed himself in a classroom at approximately 9:40 a.m.

Police soon learned that sometime earlier that morning, before arriving at Sandy Hook, Lanza had shot and killed his 52-year-old mother at their home. She owned the weapons her son used in his deadly rampage.

Source: history.com Image: Wikipedia

List of deaths

Killed:

• Perpetrator’s mother:
  • Nancy Lanza, 52 (shot at home)^[23]
• School personnel:
  • Rachel D’Avino, 29, behavior therapist^[24]
  • Dawn Hochsprung, 47, principal
  • Anne Marie Murphy, 52, special education teacher^[25]
  • Lauren Rousseau, 30, teacher
  • Mary Sherlach, 56, school psychologist
  • Victoria Leigh Soto, 27, teacher
• Students:
  • Charlotte Bacon, 6^[26]
  • Daniel Barden, 7
  • Olivia Engel, 6
  • Josephine Gay, 7
  • Dylan Hockley, 6
  • Madeleine Hsu, 6
  • Catherine Hubbard, 6
  • Chase Kowalski, 7
  • Jesse Lewis, 6
  • Ana Márquez-Greene, 6
  • James Mattioli, 6
  • Grace McDonnell, 7
  • Emilie Parker, 6
  • Jack Pinto, 6
  • Noah Pozner, 6
  • Caroline Previdi, 6^[27]
  • Jessica Rekos, 6
  • Avielle Richman, 6
  • Benjamin Wheeler, 6
  • Allison Wyatt, 6
• Perpetrator:
  • Adam Lanza, 20 (suicide)

Wounded:

• Natalie Hammond, 40, lead teacher
• Deborah Pisani^[28]

Sources:^[29][30][31] Wikipedia

1939 USSR expelled from the League of Nations

On December 14, 1939, the League of Nations, the international peacekeeping organization formed at the end of World War I, expels the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in response to the Soviets’ invasion of Finland on November 30. Although the League of Nations was more or …read more

Citation Information

Article Title

USSR expelled from the League of Nations

Author History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ussr-expelled-from-the-league-of-nations

Access Date

December 14, 2022

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

December 10, 2020

Original Published Date

November 5, 2009

People in east China’s Nanjing City paid their respects during a memorial ceremony on December 13 to honor the 300,000 victims of the Nanjing Massacre, which occurred during World War II. At 10:01 a.m., sirens sounded across the city. Drivers in downtown Nanjing stopped their cars and honked their horns, while pedestrians paused to remember the victims. Seventeen burial sites of victims, 12 communities and six patriotic education bases held simultaneous memorial activities. For more: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-12-13…

Kenya declared its independence from Britain on December 12, 1963. The East African nation is freed from its colonial oppressors, but its struggle for democracy is far from over.

A decade before, in 1952, a rebellion known the Mau Mau Uprising had shaken the British colony. Not only did the British spend an estimated £55 million suppressing the uprising, they also carried out massacres of civilians, forced several hundred thousand Kenyans into concentration camps, and suspended civil liberties in some cities. The war ended in the imprisonment and execution of many of the rebels, but the British also understood that things had permanently changed. The colonial government introduced reforms making it easier for Kenyans to own land and grow coffee, a major cash crop previously reserved for European settlers. Kenyans were allowed to be elected to the Legislative Council beginning in 1957. With nationalist movements sweeping across the continent and with Britain no longer financially or militarily capable of sustaining its empire, the British government and representatives from the Kenyan independence movement met in 1960 to negotiate independence.

The agreement called for a 66-seat Legislative Council, with 33 seats reserved for Black Kenyans and 20 for other ethnic groups. Jomo Kenyatta, a former leader of the Kenya African National Union whom the British had imprisoned on false charges after the Mau Mau Uprising, was sworn in as Kenya’s Prime Minister on June 1, 1963, in preparation for the transition to independence. The new nation’s flag was modeled on that of the Union and featured a Masai shield at its center.

Source: history.com