Connecticut: As a heartbroken town mourned the death of 20 small children in another US mass shooting, President Barack Obama heard ever louder calls to halt the bloodshed with stricter gun laws.
As Obama prepared to visit Sunday the country’s latest school shooting tragedy, there was much talk that perhaps America had reached a tipping point that would force action to try to end its stubborn addiction to firearms.
A prominent Democratic lawmaker, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California,promised to introduce a bill to ban assault weapons on the very first day of the next Congress, January 3.
That’s the kind of rapid-fire killing machine employed in the massacre here Friday in this small town now doomed to suffer a recurring nightmare for a long time to come.
“We’re crafting this one. It will be done with care,” Feinstein said, adding that she thought Obama, a fellow Democrat, would back the legislation.
was evacuatedNerves remained on edge. One Catholic church where people attended services Sunday — Saint Rose of Lima —Â due to an undisclosed threat. Armed police searched a house next door.
In ways big and small, tributes were paid — from candles lit and teddy bears left at the elementary school crime scene here in Newtown, to gestures at the cavernous football stadiums that usually fixate Americans’ attention on Sundays.
Before the day’s games, the National Football League had teams observe a minute’s silence in memory of the 26 people killed in the shooting — including the 20 six- and seven-year-olds shot by a reportedly disturbed young man armed to the teeth.
Obama was to visit Newtown, until now a quaint postcard-pretty town of 27,000, on Sunday evening. He will meet with families of victims and first responders who had to view the carnage, and attend an interfaith vigil.
As people awaited the leader, they poured into churches to pray and seek solace over the unimaginable — a gunman pumping shot after shot into small children with a rifle of the kind used in wars.
Six adults at the school were also killed. The shooter first killed his mother at her home before driving to Sandy Hook Elementary School and carrying out the slaughter in two classrooms of 1st graders, then killed himself as sirens rang out and police arrived.
From early Sunday churches filled and the town Christmas tree became an impromptu place of remembrance, with people pausing every few minutes to pray and cross themselves under a light snowfall.
One middle-aged woman knelt down in front of the ranks of votive candles, teddy bears and handwritten notes, and bowed her head in tears.
“The community is gathering together and praying,” Rosty Slabicky, a Red Cross volunteer told AFP at the Saint Rose of Lima Church, where worshippers flocked to Mass.
 “They are destroyed,” Slabicky said. “Not just the families, but the first responders are dealing with the crisis in a very personal and emotional level.”
Meanwhile, the investigation entered an important new stage with the autopsy of shooter Adam Lanza.
Coroners, who on Saturday formally identified all the school victims, were turning their attention to Lanza and also his mother, whom he murdered in her Newtown home immediately before heading to the school.
That autopsy was likely to start lifting the lid on the mystery of Lanza, who at 20 years old was seen as a withdrawn and awkward youngster, but had shown no signs of violence, let alone any indications that he might perpetrate a massacre.
Officials revealed Saturday that Lanza’s main weapon was a .223 caliber Bushmaster, a civilian version of the US military’s M4 — essentially a killing machine — registered to his mother.
He was known to have two pistols with him as well and Connecticut police spokesman Paul Vance said Sunday that a fourth gun had been found.
Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy revealed that Lanza blasted his way into the school, which had just installed a new security door where visitors could be viewed by video camera and buzzed in.
“He shot his way into the building. He penetrated the building by literally shooting an entrance into the building. That’s what an assault weapon can do for you,” Malloy said on CNN.
The tragedy revived calls for stricter laws on gun ownership, particularly regarding military-style rifles, which fire bullets designed to tear a target apart, but are marketed as regular hunting weapons.
“There will be a bill,” insisted Feinstein, a longtime gun-control advocate.
“It will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation, and the possession. Not retroactively, but prospectively. It will ban the same for big clips, drums or strips of more than 10 bullets,” she told NBC television.
Many states, including Connecticut, already have strict laws on the purchase of firearms, but with no federal statutes, there is little to stop the traffic of guns from other states where fewer restrictions apply.
An assault weapon ban was passed in 1994 under Bill Clinton but it expired in 2004 and was never resurrected. Obama supported restoring the law while running for president in 2008 but did not make it a priority during his first term.
“We have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,” Obama said in his weekly radio address on Saturday. “Regardless of the politics.”
However, with gun ownership protected by the constitution and firearms popular among a broad base of Americans, especially conservative Republicans, most politicians see gun bans as a vote-losing proposition.
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