History of Solidarity History of Solidarity The history of Solidarity (, pronounced ), a Polish non-governmental trade union, began on August 14, 1980, at the Lenin Shipyards (now Gdańsk Shipyards) at its founding by Lech Wałęsa and others. In the early 1980s, it became the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country. Solidarity gave rise to a broad, non-violent, anti-communist social movement that, at its height, claimed some 9.4 million members. It is considered to have contributed greatly to the fall of communism. Poland's communist government attempted to destroy the union by instituting martial law in 1981, followed by several years of
Mass shootings in the United States that hundreds of mass shootings take place in the United States in a single calendar year, citing a crowd-funded website known as "Shooting Tracker" which defines a mass shooting as having four or more people injured or killed. In December 2015, "The Washington Post" reported that there had been 355 mass shootings in the United States so far that year. In August 2015, "The Washington Post" reported that the United States was averaging one mass shooting per day. An earlier report had indicated that in 2015 alone, there had been 294 mass shootings that killed or injured 1,464 people. "Shooting