The Stockton schoolyard shooting (also known as the Cleveland Elementary School shooting and the Cleveland School massacre) was an act of mass murder which occurred at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, on January 17, 1989. The perpetrator, 24-year-old Patrick Purdy, shot and killed five children and wounded thirty-one others—all but one of them children—before committing suicide with a single pistol shot to the head approximately three minutes after first opening fire.

The shooting sparked intense public controversy over the necessity for members of the public to own any model of firearm classifying as assault weapons and ultimately inspired the Roberti–Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989: an act prohibiting the ownership and transfer of over fifty specific brands and models of assault weapons in California. This act was signed into effect on May 24, 1989.

At the time, the Stockton schoolyard shooting was the worst school shooting (in terms of number of fatalities) to occur at a non-college institution, being surpassed nine years later by the Columbine High School massacre. The shooting was also the deadliest to occur at an American elementary school until the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 17, 1989, an anonymous individual telephoned the Stockton Police Department to report a death threat against Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California. At approximately 11:40 a.m., Patrick Purdy arrived at the school in his battered 1977 Chevrolet station wagon; he parked the vehicle at the rear of the property and entered the premises through a gate, carrying a semi-automatic rifle and two handguns as, approximately forty-five seconds later, his station wagon detonated and burned courtesy of a Molotov cocktail he had placed inside the vehicle. Approximately three hundred children were in the school playground at this time.

Purdy first entered the school playground, where he began firing with his semi-automatic rifle while positioned behind a portable building, firing a total of sixty-six rounds in his initial salvo. According to a teacher who survived this initial section of Purdy's attack on the school, Purdy "was not talking [or] yelling; he was very straight-faced ... it didn't look like he was really angry" as he fired "left to right" in a spraying motion. One child injured in this initial salvo, 6-year-old Robert Young, would later recollect his feet "were swept up" as he was shot in the foot by a bullet followed by an immediate "slap against [his] chest" as a further bullet impacted against the playground and ricocheted into his upper chest as he fell.

Purdy then ran toward a differing vantage point and fired the final nine rounds of ammunition from his 75-round magazine into fleeing children before reloading and expending all thirty rounds of ammunition within his second magazine at any available targets he sighted.

At 12:02 p.m., Purdy committed suicide by shooting himself in the right temple with a pistol. He had fired 106 rounds of ammunition—the vast majority at or in the direction of children—within the space of approximately three minutes.

He had carved the words "freedom", "victory", "Earthman", and "Hezbollah" on his rifle, and his flak jacket was inscribed with "PLO", "Libya", and "Death to the Great Satin" [sic].

The shooting killed five children and wounded thirty-two others, including a teacher. Four of the children who died were of Cambodian ancestry, whereas one child was Vietnamese. All five fatalities were children of families who had emigrated to the U.S. as refugees. Furthermore, although the wounded consisted of children of all races, approximately two-thirds of the wounded were also of Southeast Asian ancestry.

On January 23, 1989, a two-hour service to remember the victims of the Stockton schoolyard shooting was observed at the Stockton Civic Center. This multifaith service was attended by over 2,000 mourners and saw many attendees wearing black and white ribbons in a traditional Cambodian symbolic gesture of mourning in the presence of the flower-draped caskets of four of the murdered children.

This service concluded with five minutes of silence—one for each victim—and was followed by the funerals of four of the five children and observed the Buddhist rituals in accordance with the beliefs of Oeun Lim and Rathnahar Or and the Baptist faiths of Sokhim An and Ram Chun. The fifth child murdered in the Stockton schoolyard shooting, Thuy Tran, had been laid to rest on January 21 in a Christian burial in accordance with her Roman Catholic beliefs. Nonetheless, Tran's loss was also observed at this service, in which Christian hymns were also sung within a community chorus.

Although Purdy's ultimate motive for his murder spree remains unknown, he had primarily, though not exclusively, targeted children of Southeast Asian ancestry attending an elementary school within Stockton he had previously attended and in a city which, in the eight years prior to the massacre, had seen the population of Southeast Asians—the vast majority of whom were refugees or children of refugees—increase from fewer than 1,000 to over 30,000.

Hours before embarking on his murder spree, Purdy is known to have remarked to a fellow resident of the El Rancho motel in which he resided: "Those damn Hindus and boat people own everything!" He is known to have made a similar remark in a bar shortly after New Year's Day 1989. Furthermore, Purdy is known to have suffered from depression throughout his life and to have expressed frustrations regarding his lack of familial stability, education, and personal accomplishments. His targeting of the children of immigrants with a generally high demographic academic achievement, within an educational faculty he had himself attended in his formative years, may have been a symbolic act of suicidal rage against society—with a possible resentful xenophobic accompaniment—for the fortune, stability and potential given to some within society including immigrants, but not to others including himself.

Patrick Edward Purdy (November 10, 1964 – January 17, 1989) was an unemployed former welder and drifter. He was born in Tacoma, Washington, to Patrick Benjamin and Kathleen (née Toscano) Purdy. His father was a soldier in the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Lewis at the time of his son's birth. When the younger Purdy was two years old, his mother filed for divorce against her husband following an incident in which he had threatened to kill her with a firearm. Purdy's mother later moved with her son to South Lake Tahoe, California before settling in Stockton, where Purdy attended Cleveland Elementary from kindergarten through to second grade.

Purdy's mother remarried in September 1969; she divorced her husband four years later. Purdy's stepfather, Albert Gulart Sr., would later state Purdy was an overly quiet child and a loner who cried often.

In the fall of 1973, Purdy's mother and stepfather separated; she moved with her children from Stockton to Sacramento. In December of that year, the Sacramento Child Protective Services were twice called to her residence, on allegations that Kathleen was physically abusing her children. When Purdy was thirteen, he struck his mother in the face and was permanently banned from her house. He lived on the streets of San Francisco for a period before being placed in foster care by authorities. He was later placed in the custody of his father, who was living in Lodi, California, at the time. While attending Lodi High School, Purdy became an alcoholic and a drug addict, and attended high school sporadically.

On September 6, 1981, Purdy's father, Patrick Sr., died after being struck by a car. His family filed a wrongful-death suit in San Joaquin Superior Court against the driver of the car, asking for US$600,000 in damages; the suit was later dismissed. Purdy accused his mother of taking money his father had left him, using the money to buy a car and taking a vacation to New York City. This incident appeared to deepen the animosity between them. After his father's death, Purdy was briefly homeless, before being placed in the custody of a foster mother in Los Angeles.

Purdy's criminal activities had begun by 1977, when Sacramento police confiscated BB guns from then 12-year-old Purdy. In May 1980, Purdy was first arrested at age 15 for a court-order violation. He was arrested that same month for underage drinking. Purdy was then arrested for prostitution in August 1980, possession of marijuana and drug dealing in 1982, and in 1983 for possession of an illegal weapon and receipt of stolen property. On October 11, 1984, he was arrested for being an accomplice in an armed robbery at a service station, for which he spent 32 days in the Yolo County Jail. In 1986, Kathleen called police after Purdy vandalized her car after she refused to give him money for narcotics.

In April 1987, Purdy and his half-brother Albert were arrested for firing a semi-automatic pistol at trees in the Eldorado National Forest. At the time, he was carrying a book about the white supremacist group Aryan Nations. He told the County Sheriff that it was his "duty to help the suppressed and overthrow the suppressor." In prison, he twice attempted suicide, once by hanging himself with a rope made out of strips of his shirt, and a second time by cutting his wrists with his fingernails. A subsequent psychiatric assessment found him to have a mild mental impairment, and to be a danger to himself and others.

In the fall of 1987, Purdy began attending welding classes at San Joaquin Delta College; he complained about the high percentage of Southeast Asian students there. In October 1987, he left California and drifted among Oregon, Nevada, Texas, Florida, Connecticut, South Carolina, and Tennessee, searching for jobs. In early 1988, he worked at Numeri Tech, a small machine shop located in Stockton. From July to October 1988, he worked as a boilermaker in Portland, Oregon, living in Sandy with his aunt.

On August 3 in Sandy, he purchased a Chinese-made AK-47 at Sandy Trading Post; this would be the weapon Purdy used in the Stockton schoolyard shooting. He eventually returned to Stockton and rented a room at the El Rancho Motel on December 26. After the shooting, police found his room decorated with numerous toy soldiers. On December 28, Purdy purchased a Taurus 9mm pistol at the Hunter Loan pawn shop in Stockton.

Police stated that Purdy had problems with alcohol and drug addiction. He talked openly of hatred toward Asian immigrants, believing that they took jobs from "native-born" Americans. According to Purdy's friends, who described him as friendly and never violent toward anyone, he was suicidal at times and frustrated that he failed to "make it on his own". Steve Sloan, a night-shift supervisor at Numeri Tech, said: "He was a real ball of frustration, and was angry about everything." Another one of Purdy's former co-workers stated, "He was always miserable. I've never seen a guy that didn't want to smile as much as he didn't." In a notebook found in a hotel where he lived in early 1988, Purdy wrote about himself in the following terms: "I'm so dumb, I'm dumber than a sixth-grader. My mother and father were dumb."

The multiple murders at Stockton received national news coverage and spurred calls for regulation of semiautomatic weapons. "Why could Purdy, an alcoholic who had been arrested for such offenses as selling weapons and attempted robbery, walk into a gun shop in Sandy, Oregon, and leave with an AK-47 under his arm?", Time magazine asked. The article continued: "The easy availability of weapons like this, which have no purpose other than killing human beings, can all too readily turn the delusions of sick gunmen into tragic nightmares." Immediately following the shooting, Michael Jackson made a short visit to the school and met with some of the children affected by the event.

On September 14, 1989 (four months after the shooting) in Louisville, Kentucky, Joseph Wesbacker (who was allegedly inspired by Purdy) shot up his former workplace using an AK-56 that Purdy also used, killing 8 people and injured 12 others before committing suicide. When police raided his house, they found a TIME magazine issue with an article on Purdy.

In California, measures were taken to first define and then ban assault weapons, resulting in the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989. On the federal level, Congressional legislators struggled with a way to ban weapons such as military-style rifles without banning sporting-type rifles. In 1989, the ATF issued a rule citing the lack of "sporting purpose" to ban importation of assault weapons. In July 1989, the G.H.W. Bush Administration made the import ban permanent. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban was enacted in 1994, and expired in 2004. President Bill Clinton signed another executive order in 1994 which banned importation of most firearms and ammunition from Mainland China.

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• The 2023 documentary What Will Save Us? - Remembering the Stockton School Shooting focuses upon the Stockton school shooting. Narrated by Alex Bell, this documentary features interviews with many individuals directly impacted by the shooting, including wounded students.

• January 19, 1989 New York Times news article pertaining to the Stockton schoolyard shooting
• Contemporary news article pertaining to the Stockton schoolyard shooting
• March 3, 1989 New York Times article detaining the implementation of the California Roberti–Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989
• 2014 Huffington Post news article detailing the 25th anniversary of the Stockton schoolyard shooting
• The Gun Control Act of 1968: Title 18 USC Chapter 44
• The Firearm Owners Protection Act: Title 26 USC Chapter 53