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On July 20, 2012, a mass shooting occurred inside a Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises. Dressed in tactical clothing, James Eagan Holmes set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple firearms. Twelve people were killed and seventy others were injured, 58 of them from gunfire. At the time, the attack had the largest number of casualties in one shooting in modern U.S. history, until the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016 and the Las Vegas shooting in 2017. It was the deadliest shooting in Colorado since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Holmes was arrested in his car outside the cinema minutes later. He had earlier rigged his apartment with homemade explosives and incendiary devices, which were defused by the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office Bomb Squad a day after the shooting.
The shooting prompted an increase in security at movie theaters across the U.S. that were screening the same film, in fear of copycat crimes. It led to a spike in gun sales in Colorado and political debates about gun control in the United States.
Holmes confessed to the shooting but pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Arapahoe County prosecutors sought the death penalty for Holmes. The trial began on April 27, 2015. On July 16, he was convicted of 24 counts of first-degree murder, 140 counts of attempted first-degree murder, and one count of possessing explosives. On August 7, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. On August 26, he was given twelve life sentences, one for every person he killed; he also received 3,318 years for the attempted murders of those he wounded and for rigging his apartment with explosives.

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