School Shooting, Newtown | featured news

The Senate has rejected a bipartisan effort to expand federal background checks to more firearms buyers in a crucial showdown over gun control. Today's vote was a jarring blow to the drive to curb firearms sparked by December's massacre of children and staff at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. President Barack Obama made broadened background checks the centerpiece of his gun control proposals.

Legislative debates over gun rights, up significantly since the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., have spurred alleged death threats resulting in two high-profile arrests and causing lawmakers in one state to declare their legislature was under attack.

A month after a gunman invaded Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 children and six adults, a group of local residents are calling for efforts to make communities safer from gun violence.

The shootings in Newtown, Conn., two weeks ago sparked an intense reaction across the country, and opinion polls captured major changes in the way the public interprets such events and how strict gun laws should be but only minor shifts in support for specific policies.

This normally quiet town has been flooded by reporters, caregivers and well-wishers from out of town who have come to report Friday's mass school shooting, offer counseling to residents and pay their respects at makeshift memorials.

A family acquaintance says Adam Lanza, who killed 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, had not seen his father for two years, despite the father's efforts.

Only one child made it out alive of a first-grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School last week — by fooling the gunman into thinking she was  dead, the family's pastor says.

The aunt of gunman Adam Lanza talks to the media about her nephew, saying he was "well-educated, different."

The shooting deaths of 16 children and their teacher in the Scottish town of Dunblane in 1996 stunned the country. What did Britain do to try to prevent such a tragedy happening again?

He carried a black briefcase to his 10th-grade honors English class, and sat near the door so he could readily slip in and out. When called upon, he was intelligent, but nervous and fidgety, spitting his words out, as if having to speak up were painful.