NEWTOWN, Connecticut - Heart-rending funerals were held Monday for
two six-year-old boys, as America began to say farewell to the 20
children slain in a school shooting that sparked calls for new gun laws.
The first burials, held under raw, wet skies, were of a pair of boys
among those shot in Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown,
Connecticut. On Tuesday, the first of the girls, also aged six, is to be
laid to rest.
In all, on Friday, the gunman slaughtered 20 children aged between
six and seven, six adults working at the school and his own mother,
before turning one of his arsenal of high-powered firearms on himself.
The family of one boy, Jack Pinto, gathered at a funeral home in a
century-old building in the center of the Connecticut town. Some 20
children of different ages came, along with about two dozen adults.
Jack Wellman, an eighth-grader who helped coach wrestling at the
school, said fellow school wrestlers placed their sports medals in the
coffin of Jack, a keen wrestler.
"He was an excellent kid," Wellman said at a nearby deli afterwards.
Another participant came out in shock. "I just cannot describe it, it
was sad. The message was just comforting," she said. "Our hearts are
heavy."
All the schools in this prosperous and picturesque dormitory town
were shut until at least Tuesday and the blood-spattered elementary
school itself was to remain a closed crime scene indefinitely,
authorities said.
"Healing is still going on," Newtown police Lieutenant George Sinko said.
In the nearby town of Ridgefield, reports of a suspicious person
prompted the brief lockdown and deployment of police Monday at all
schools, indicating the jitters in the United States in the wake of the
killings.
For Newtown, a quiet suburban community where the 20-year-old killer
lived with his well-off mother, the start of funerals was hardly likely
to settle the nightmare of what happened last Friday.
But the crime, in which the murderer carried a high-powered, military
style rifle and two handguns, may have spurred change in the political
landscape regarding rules on weapons ownership.
In an indication of how widely the shock has been felt, the Senate held a moment's silence in Washington.
Late Sunday, President Barack Obama joined a vigil in Newtown and
pledged to work for an end to mass shootings, which have now become a
regular event in the United States -- with half-a-dozen massacres since
Obama took office.
"These tragedies must end," Obama said, appearing to commit himself
to a push for reform in his second White House term, possibly by urging
the restoration of a federal ban on assault weapons like the one used in
Newtown.
Earlier, Democratic 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.
And on Monday, Senator Joe Lieberman called for a broad commission
that could bring opponents on the issue together to discuss curbing gun
deaths.
Each year, more than 31,000 Americans die from gunshots, most of them
self-inflicted, but more than 11,000 in homicides -- five times as many
as the death toll for US troops during an entire decade of conflict in
Afghanistan.
"We've got to bring everybody to the table, including the gun
manufacturers and the gun rights groups and the entertainment industry
and just regular people," Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent, told
Fox News.
But with gun ownership protected by the US constitution and firearms
deeply ingrained in American culture, attempts to restrict access have
long been seen as a vote-losing proposition.
Bit by bit, the full picture of the horror and heroism in the school,
where the deranged shooter, Adam Lanza, sprayed bullets into two rooms,
was starting to emerge.
The husband of Dawn Hochsprung, the slain school principal, said she
had told others around her to hide. Then she "and at least one other
teacher went out and actually tried to subdue the killer."
"I don't know where that comes from. Dawn was 5'2," he said.
"Dawn put herself in jeopardy and I have been angry about that, angry
-- until just now, when I met two women that she told to go under
shelter while she actually confronted the gunman."
One of the teachers, Janet Balmer, told CNN how the moment she heard
gunshots she followed the lockdown routine that they'd recently
practiced, then tried to act in front of her five-year-old charges as if
all was well.
"We sat in the cubby away from the door so no one could see us, read them a story and talked to them," she said.
After agonizing minutes, police knocked at the door and told the
children to leave -- and "cover their eyes" to avoid being exposed to
the gore.
"At five, covering your eyes and walking isn't so easy. I just had them, you know, look towards the wall," Balmer said.
No information about a possible motive, or whether Lanza had any
diagnosed mental condition, has emerged. He is believed to have first
shot his mother in their house before going to the school.
Police remained tight-lipped, but said they are making progress. "We
definitely are peeling that onion back, layer by layer," the state
police spokesman said.
Newtown was the second deadliest school shooting in US history after
the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, in which South Korean student
Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before
taking his own life.
In the previously most notorious recent incident, a 24-year-old,
James Holmes, allegedly killed 12 people and wounded 58 others when he
opened fire at a midnight screening of the latest Batman movie in
Aurora, Colorado, in July.
Source: abs-cbnnews.com