1989 - Stockton Massacre

The Stockton Massacre at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton was a shooting involving a white male and victims of East Asian descent. The perpetrator Patrick Purdy shot and killed five children while wounding 29 others and one teacher, and then proceeded to take his life after the shooting. The shooting occurred on January 17, 1989 and gained national which brought about many more repercussions regarding the availability of weapons.

Patrick Edward Purdy was an unemployed welder and drifter. He was born on November 10, 1964 in Tacoma, Washington. His father as a soldier of the United States Army and when he was two years old, his mother filed a divorce against her husband after he threatened to kill her with a gun. Purdy moved with his mother to Lake Tahoe and then Stockton, in which he was an attendee of Cleveland Elementary School from kindergarten to second grade. Purdy had a turbulent childhood in which he supposedly cried often, struck his mother in the face which got him banned from her home, and also became an alcoholic and drug addict, all while still in high school.

Aside from his rough childhood, Purdy also had a long criminal history. He was arrested at age 15 for violating a court order and again in the same month for underage drinking. He was also arrested for homosexual prostitution in 1980, possession of marijuana and drug dealing 1982, possession of an illegal weapon and receipt of stolen property in 1983, accomplice of armed robbery in 1984, and vandalism of his mother's vehicle in 1986 after she refused to give him money for drugs.

During the fall of 1987, he took welding classes at San Joaquin Delta College and complained about the high percentage of Asian students there. He was supposedly a misanthrope, with his hatred especially directed towards Asian immigrants, whom he believed stole jobs from native-born Americans. It is clear that he viewed Asians and Asian-Americans as deviants and professed his pent up hatred for them in the shooting.

The shooting brought about many laws regarding firearms. California defined assault weapons and then banned them, which resulted in the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Act. On the federal level, Congress enacted a federal assault weapons ban which went into effect in 1994 and expired in 2004. President George H. W. Bush signed an executive order which banned the importing of assault weapons in 1989 and President Bill Clinton signed another order in 1994 which banned imports of most weapons and ammunition from China.