Oak Creek gurdwara shooting, Wisconsin

Who: Wade Michael Page, a 40-year-old Army veteran whom the Southern Poverty Law Center described as a former leader of the neo-Nazi band End Apathy, and the worshippers of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. The six killed were Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65, the temple's president; Prakash Singh, 39; Paramjit Kaur Saini, 41; Sita Singh, 41; Ranjit Singh, 49; and Suveg Singh, 84.

What: On Sunday 5 August 2012 police took the first call at 10:25 am, as the congregation prepared for the weekly service. Page, armed with a 9mm handgun he had bought legally in the days before, shot at least one person in the parking lot and then killed six inside. Kaleka picked up a knife, the only weapon at hand. His resistance gave women time to hide in a pantry and children in the Sunday school time to get out. Lt. Brian Murphy, the first officer to arrive, was shot repeatedly at close range and waved other officers on towards the temple. Another officer shot Page, who then shot himself. The FBI treated the attack as possible domestic terrorism and said that nobody had known Page was a threat. Baba Punjab Singh, a Sikh religious teacher who travelled to give kathas, was shot and left paralysed. He died in March 2020, nearly eight years after the attack.

Where: The Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, Oak Creek, Wisconsin, United States.

Why it mattered: The community did not close its doors. Investigators released the temple on Thursday 9 August, four days after the attack, and it reopened. A public wake was set for the next day at Oak Creek High School, and vigils were held across the country that week. Community spokesman Kulwant Singh Dhaliwal said of the response, "Grief shared is grief halved."

The attack also exposed a gap in federal records: the FBI's hate crime form had no category for crimes against Sikhs. SALDEF says more than 140 members of Congress then urged the FBI to track them. On 19 September 2012 a Senate Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Dick Durbin held a hearing. Harpreet Singh Saini, whose mother Paramjit Kaur Saini was killed, asked the government to give her "the dignity of being a statistic". Valarie Kaur wrote that it was the first congressional hearing held in response to hate crimes against Sikh Americans. A Justice Department official said the department would review how victims were classified. In 2013 the Justice Department and FBI announced that they would track hate crimes against Sikhs, and anti-Sikh incidents became a category for collection in 2015, with an updated FBI training manual issued in March 2015.