Shootings, Connecticut Elementary School Shooting | featured news

The Motion Picture Association of America announced changes to its movie rating system Tuesday, saying it wants to help parents make informed decisions at the multiplex. The new system, rolled out as the "Check the Box" campaign, will include prominent descriptions explaining why a movie received its rating. Films that might previously have been stamped PG-13 with a sentence beneath the rating will now feature those same descriptions in large type next to the ratings code.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy is expected on Thursday to sign a tough new gun law that restricts sales of the sort of high-capacity ammunition clips that a gunman used to massacre 26 people in minutes in a December attack on a school.

Adam Lanza left a home stuffed with weaponry and carried out the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in a 154-bullet barrage that took less than five minutes, investigators said Thursday in the first detailed account of his surroundings and troubled state of mind.

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.

Recalling the shooting of 20 first graders as the worst day of his presidency, President Barack Obama on Sunday pledged to put his "full weight" behind a legislative package next year aimed at containing gun violence.

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.

The nation's largest gun-rights lobby called Friday for armed police officers to be posted in every American school to stop the next killer "waiting in the wings."

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.