Schools across the country, already on edge following last week's massacre of 20 students and six adults at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school have been further unnerved following a series of copycat threats, sometimes yielding arrests and caches of deadly weapons.
From California to Connecticut, police in the past five days have arrested more than a dozen individuals in Indiana, South Carolina, Maryland and elsewhere who were plotting or threatening to attack schools.
"After high-profile incidents like the shootings at Columbine and Sandy Hook, threats go off the wall. Some of those threats turn out to be unfounded, but sometimes those incidents propel people planning legitimate threats," Ken Trump, a national school safety consultant, told ABCNews.com.
CLICK HERE FOR AN INTERACTIVE MAP AND TIMELINE OF THE SANDY HOOK SHOOTING.
Many of these incidents turned out to be little more than young people acting out or seeking attention, but in some cases police found significant stockpiles of firearms and ammunition.
Just a few hours after the world learned what happened inside the halls at the Sandy Hook elementary school, police arrested a 60-year-old Indiana man who had allegedly threatened to "kill as many people as he could before police stopped him," according to the police report, at an elementary school in Cedar Lake, Ind.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Indiana School Shooting Threat: Parents Not Notified Watch Video
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When Von Meyer was arrested, just 1,000 feet from Jane Ball Elementary School, police confiscated from his home $100,000 worth of guns and ammunition including 47 weapons.
The school was placed on lockdown.
Meyer's case was taken by the Lake County public defender's office, but an attorney has not yet been assigned. He has been charged with seven crimes, including felonious intimidation, and an automatic "not guilty" plea was made on his behalf at a hearing on Tuesday.
Many of the suspects arrested in the wake of the Connecticut shooting were themselves school students – teenagers or young adults.
On Wednesday, in Laurel, Md., an unidentified student at Laurel High School was taken to the hospital and placed under psychiatric evaluation after school security officials found maps of the school and lists of students they believed he planned to kill.
Authorities called the evidence a "credible threat." The student, however, was not arrested or charged with a crime.
In Columbia, Tenn., police arrested Shawn Lenz, 19, who on Saturday posted to Facebook that he felt like "goin on a rampage, kinda like the school shooting were that one guy killed some teachers and a bunch of students."
He later told police that "it was stupid" to have written what he did. Lenz was arraigned Tuesday on terrorism and harassment charges and was appointed a public defender. He did not enter a plea.
A Tampa, Fla., school was put on lockdown two days in a row, Tuesday and Wednesday, after students found bullets on a school bus. Police there have made no arrests.
Despite the rash of recent threats, anecdotal data compiled by Trump's National School Safety and Security Services and analyzed by Scripps Howard found that there were approximately 120 known but thwarted plots against schools between 2000 and 2010. The list is not comprehensive and many incidents likely went unreported.
Fifty-five of those known threats -- all thwarted -- involved guns and 22 of them involved explosive devices, according to the Scripps Howard report.
"We're getting better at preventing these situations," Trump told ABC News.com.
But in that same time there were about 50 lethal school shootings, including the killing of 32 people at Virginia Tech.
"While shootings statistically may be rare, they impact a community and these kids forever," said Trump.
William Bennett argues that schools would be safer with at least one armed person there who is well-trained in firearms use.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
William Bennett: Arming, training one person in a school could help prevent shootings
He says armed people have stopped instances of mass killing
Killers may target places where they know they can't be shot down, Bennett says
Bennett: Guns help prevent crime and improve public safety
Editor's note: William J. Bennett, a CNN contributor, is the author of "The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood." He was U.S. secretary of education from 1985 to 1988 and director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H.W. Bush.
(CNN) -- On NBC's "Meet the Press" this past Sunday, I was asked how we can make our schools safer and prevent another massacre like Sandy Hook from happening again. I suggested that if one person in the school had been armed and trained to handle a firearm, it might have prevented or minimized the massacre.
"And I'm not so sure -- and I'm sure I'll get mail for this -- I'm not so sure I wouldn't want one person in a school armed, ready for this kind of thing," I said. "The principal lunged at this guy. The school psychologist lunged at the guy. Has to be someone who's trained. Has to be someone who's responsible."
William Bennett
Well, I sure did get mail. Many people agreed with me and sent me examples of their son or daughter's school that had armed security guards, police officers or school employees on the premises. Many others vehemently disagreed with me, and one dissenter even wrote that the blood of the Connecticut victims was ultimately on the hands of pro-gun rights advocates.
To that person I would ask: Suppose the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary who was killed lunging at the gunman was instead holding a firearm and was well trained to use it. Would the result have been different? Or suppose you had been in that school when the killer entered, would you have preferred to be armed?
Evidence and common sense suggest yes.
In 2007, a gunman entered New Life Church in Colorado Springs and shot and killed two girls. Jeanne Assam, a former police officer stationed as a volunteer security guard at the church, drew her firearm, shot and wounded the gunman before he could kill anyone else. The gunman then killed himself.
In 1997, high school student Luke Woodham stabbed his mother to death and then drove to Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi, and shot and killed two people. He then got back in his car to drive to Pearl Junior High to continue his killings, but Joel Myrick, the assistant principal, ran to his truck and grabbed his pistol, aimed it at Woodham and made him surrender.
These are but a few of many examples that the best deterrent of crime when it is occurring is effective self-defense. And the best self-defense against a gunman has proved to be a firearm.
LZ Granderson: Teachers with guns is a crazy idea
And yet, there is a near impenetrable belief among anti-gun activists that guns are the cause of violence and crime. Like Frodo's ring in "The Lord of The Rings," they believe that guns are agencies of corruption and corrupt the souls of whoever touches them. Therefore, more guns must lead to more crime.
But the evidence simply doesn't support that. Take the controversial concealed-carry permit issue, for example.
In a recent article for The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, by no means an avowed gun-rights advocate, declared, "There is no proof to support the idea that concealed-carry permit holders create more violence in society than would otherwise occur; they may, in fact, reduce it."
Goldberg cites evidence from Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA, that concealed-carry permit holders actually commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population.
The General Accountability Office recently found that the number of concealed weapon permits in America has surged to approximately 8 million.
According to anti-gun advocates, such an increase in guns would cause a cause a corresponding increase in gun-related violence or crime. In fact, the opposite is true. The FBI reported this year that violent crime rates in the U.S. are reaching historic lows.
This comes in spite of the fact that the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Supporters of the ban (not including anti-gun groups who thought it didn't go far enough in the first place) claimed that gun crime would skyrocket when the ban was lifted. That wasn't true at all.
In fact, after the expiration of the ban, The New York Times, whose editorial pages are now awash with calls for more gun restrictions, wrote in early 2005, "Despite dire predictions that America's streets would be awash in military-style guns, the expiration of the decade-long assault weapons ban in September has not set off a sustained surge in the weapons' sales, gun makers and sellers say. It also has not caused any noticeable increase in gun crime in the past seven months, according to several city police departments."
But let's take the issue one step further and examine places where all guns, regardless of make or type, are outlawed: gun-free zones. Are gun-free zones truly safe from guns?
John Lott, economist and gun-rights advocate, has extensively studied mass shootings and reports that, with just one exception, the attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011, every public shooting since 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns. The massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary, Columbine, Virginia Tech and the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, all took place in gun-free zones.
Do you own a gun that fell under the now-expired federal weapons ban?
These murderers, while deranged and deeply disturbed, are not dumb. They shoot up schools, universities, malls and public places where their victims cannot shoot back. Perhaps "gun-free zones" would be better named "defenseless victim zones."
To illustrate the absurdity of gun-free zones, Goldberg dug up the advice that gun-free universities offer to its students should a gunman open fire on campus. West Virginia University tells students to "act with physical aggression and throw items at the active shooter." These items could include "student desks, keys, shoes, belts, books, cell phones, iPods, book bags, laptops, pens, pencils, etc." Such "higher education" would be laughable if it weren't true and funded by taxpayer dollars.
Eliminating or restricting firearms for public self-defense doesn't make our citizens safer; it makes them targets. If we're going to have a national debate about guns, it should be acknowledged that guns, in the hands of qualified and trained individuals subject to background checks, prevent crime and improve public safety.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of William J. Bennett.
LONDON: Bank of England policymakers voted 8-1 to maintain their quantitative easing stimulus programme at their December meeting, repeating the voting pattern from the previous month, minutes showed on Wednesday.
The BoE's nine-member monetary policy committee (MPC) had voted earlier this month to keep the QE stimulus amount at 375 billion pounds ($611 billion, 460 billion euros).
Polcymakers were also unanimous in keeping the bank's key interest rate at 0.50 percent, according the minutes from the December 5-6 gathering. British borrowing costs have stood at this record low level since March 2009.
Lone policymaker David Miles voted again this month for an extra £25 billion for the asset purchasing programme in order to lift economic growth, repeating his call from November.
Under quantitative easing, the Bank of England creates cash that is used to purchase assets such as government and corporate bonds with the aim of boosting lending and in turn economic activity.
He was best known for contentious confirmation battle over his Supreme Court nomination
Bork was a staunch advocate for 'originalism'
He was 85
Washington (CNN) -- Former federal judge and conservative legal scholar Robert Bork died early Wednesday at his home in Virginia, his family confirmed to CNN.
Bork, who was 85, was best known for being nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, only to be rejected for the post after a contentious confirmation battle led by left-leaning groups who opposed his conservative judicial philosophies.
Bork had recently served as a senior legal adviser to Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. He was a solicitor general during the Nixon administration and first gained notoriety for acceding to the president's order to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal in 1973, an episode known as the "Saturday Night Massacre."
But it was the Senate's rejection of his high court nomination that earned the conservative Bork a political legacy -- symbolic of the contentious, partisan nature of congressional confirmations.
In recent years, Bork was a well-regarded conservative voice on legal and constitutional matters, author of several books and frequent commentator.
He told CNN in 2005 that he had to endure his failed nomination as a metaphor. To "Bork" someone has entered the popular lexicon as attacking a public figure in the media for partisan gain.
"My name became a verb," he said. "And I regard that as one form of immortality."
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Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's senior legal analyst, called Bork "an epic figure in American law."
Bork was also known as a staunch advocate for "originalism," a principle that defends the original intent of the Constitution.
Toobin said Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas followed Bork's example on this principle.
It made Bork "one of the intellectual godfathers of the conservative movement in this country," Toobin said.
This fall, he was tapped to co-chair Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's justice advisory committee.
Bork suffered in past years with heart disease. Before his death, he was a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, which researches and analyzes issues involving defense policy, international relations, health care, technology culture and law.
The foundation's president and CEO, Kenneth Weinstein, said Bork will be missed.
"Robert Bork was a giant, a brilliant and fearless legal scholar, and a gentleman whose incredible wit and erudition made him a wonderful Hudson colleague," Weinstein said in a statement on the organization's website.
MCLEAN, Va. Robert H. Bork, who stepped in to fire the Watergate prosecutor at Richard Nixon's behest and whose failed 1980s nomination to the Supreme Court helped draw the modern boundaries of cultural fights over abortion, civil rights and other issues, has died. He was 85.
Son Robert H. Bork Jr. confirmed to The Associated Press his father died Wednesday at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va. The son said Bork died from complications of heart ailments.
A spokesman for the Washington think-tank Hudson Institute where Bork was a distinguished fellow confirmed his death to CBS News.
Brilliant, blunt, and piercingly witty, Robert Heron Bork had a long career in politics and the law that took him from respected academic to a totem of conservative grievance.
Along the way, Bork was accused of being a partisan hatchet man for Nixon when, as the third-ranking official at the Justice Department he fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973. Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned rather than fire Cox. The next in line, William Ruckelshaus, refused to fire Cox and was himself fired.
Bork's drubbing during the 1987 Senate nomination hearings made him a hero to the right and a rallying cry for younger conservatives.
The Senate experience embittered Bork and hardened many of his conservative positions, even as it gave him prominence as an author and long popularity on the conservative speaking circuit.
"Robert Bork was a giant, a brilliant and fearless legal scholar, and a gentleman whose incredible wit and erudition made him a wonderful Hudson colleague," said Hudson Institute head Kenneth Weinstein.
Known before his Supreme Court nomination as one of the foremost national experts on antitrust law, Bork became much more widely known as a conservative cultural critic in the years that followed.
His 1996 book, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," was an acid indictment of what Bork viewed as the crumbling ethics of modern society and the morally bankrupt politics of the left.
"Opportunities for teen-agers to engage in sex are ... more frequent than previously; much of it takes place in homes that are now empty because the mothers are working," Bork wrote then. "The modern liberal devotion to sex education is an ideological commitment rather than a policy of prudence."
Bork, known until his death as "Judge Bork," served a relatively short tenure on the bench. He was a federal judge on the nation's most prestigious appellate panel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, from 1982 until 1988, when he resigned in the wake of the bitter Supreme Court nomination fight.
Earlier, Bork had been a private attorney, Yale Law School professor and a Republican political appointee.
At Yale, two of his constitutional law students were Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham.
"I no longer say they were students," Bork joked long afterward. "I say they were in the room."
Nixon named Bork as solicitor general, the administration's advocate before the Supreme Court, in January 1973.
Bork served as acting attorney general after Richardson's resignation, then returned to the solicitor general's job until 1977, far outlasting the Nixon administration.
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill in Washington Sept. 16, 1987.
/ AP Photo
Long mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee, Bork got his chance toward the end of Ronald Reagan's second term. He was nominated July 1, 1987, to fill the seat vacated by Justice Lewis F. Powell.
Nearly four months later the Senate voted 58-42 to defeat him, after the first national political and lobbying offensive mounted against a judicial nominee.
It was the largest negative vote ever recorded for a Supreme Court nominee.
Reagan and Bork's Senate backers called him eminently qualified — a brilliant judge who had managed to write nearly a quarter of his court's majority rulings in just five years on the bench, without once being overturned by the Supreme Court.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., summed up the opposition by saying, "In Robert Bork's America there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women."
Critics also called Bork a free-speech censor and a danger to the principle of separation of church and state.
Bork's opponents used his prolific writings against him, and some called him a hypocrite when he seemed to waffle on previous strongly worded positions.
Despite a reputation for personal charm, Bork did not play well on television. He answered questions in a seemingly bloodless, academic style and he cut a severe figure, with hooded eyes and heavy, rustic beard.
Stoic and stubborn throughout, Bork refused to withdraw when his defeat seemed assured.
The fight has defined every high-profile judicial nomination since, and largely established the opposing roles of vocal and well-funded interest groups in Senate nomination fights. Bork would say later that the ferocity of the fight took him and the Reagan White House by surprise, and he rebuked the administration for not doing more to salvage his nomination.
The process begat a verb, "to bork," meaning vilification of a nominee on ideological grounds. In later years, some accused Bork of borking Clinton nominees with nearly the zeal that some liberal commentators had pursued him.
Bork denied any animus, and said he was happy commenting, writing and making money outside government. Even friends did not entirely believe that.
"He was very embittered by the experience," said lawyer Andrew Frey, a longtime friend who worked for Bork in the solicitor general's office. "He was not well treated, and partly as a result of that he did become more conservative."
While schools across America reassess their security measures in the wake of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., one school outside of Chicago takes safety to a whole new level.
The security measures at Middleton Elementary School start the moment you set foot on campus, with a camera-equipped doorbell. When you ring the doorbell, school employees inside are immediately able to see you, both through a window and on a security camera.
“They can assess your demeanor,” Kate Donegan, the superintendent of Skokie School District 73 ½, said in an interview with ABC News.
Once the employees let you through the first set of doors, you are only able to go as far as a vestibule. There you hand over your ID so the school can run a quick background check using a visitor management system devised by Raptor Technologies. According to the company’s CEO, Jim Vesterman, only 8,000 schools in the country are using that system, while more than 100,000 continue to use the old-fashioned pen-and-paper system, which do not do as much to drive away unwanted intruders.
“Each element that you add is a deterrent,” Vesterman said.
In the wake of the Newtown shooting, Vesterman told ABC News his company has been “flooded” with calls to put in place the new system. Back at Middleton, if you pass the background check, you are given a new photo ID — attached to a bright orange lanyard — to wear the entire time you are inside the school. Even parents who come to the school on a daily basis still have to wear the lanyard.
“The rules apply to everyone,” Donegan said.
The security measures don’t end there. Once you don your lanyard and pass through a second set of locked doors, you enter the school’s main hallway, while security cameras continue to feed live video back into the front office.
It all comes at a cost. Donegan’s school district — with the help of security consultant Paul Timm of RETA Security — has spent more than $175,000 on the system in the last two years. For a district of only three schools and 1100 students, that is a lot of money, but it is all worth it, she said.
“I don’t know that there’s too big a pricetag to put on kids being as safe as they can be,” Donegan said.
“So often we hear we can’t afford it, but what we can’t afford is another terrible incident,” Timm said.
Classroom doors open inward — not outward — and lock from the inside, providing teachers and students security if an intruder is in the hallway. Some employees carry digital two-way radios, enabling them to communicate at all times with the push of a button. Administrators such as Donegan are able to watch the school’s security video on their mobile devices. Barricades line the edge of the school’s parking lot, keeping cars from pulling up close to the entrance.
Teachers say all the security makes them feel safe inside the school.
“I think the most important thing is just keeping the kids safe,” fourth-grade teacher Dara Sacher said.
Parents like Charlene Abraham, whose son Matthew attends Middleton, say they feel better about dropping off their kids knowing the school has such substantial security measures in place.
“We’re sending our kids to school to learn, not to worry about whether they’re going to come home or not,” she said.
In the wake of the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook last Friday, Donegan’s district is now even looking into installing bullet-resistant glass for the school building. While Middleton’s security measures continue to put administrators, teachers, parents and students at ease, Sacher said she thinks that more extreme measures — such as arming teachers, an idea pushed by Oregon state Rep. Dennis Richardson — are a step too far.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable being armed,” Sacher said. “Even if you trained people, I think it’d be better to keep the guns out of school rather than arm teachers.”
PARIS: Coal is set to surpass oil as the world's top fuel within a decade, driven by growth in emerging market giants China and India, with even Europe finding it hard to cut use despite pollution concerns, according to a report published Tuesday.
"Thanks to abundant supplies and insatiable demand for power from emerging markets, coal met nearly half of the rise in global energy demand during the first decade of the 21st century," said Maria van der Hoeven, head of the International Energy Agency.
Economic growth is expected to push up further coal's share of the global energy mix, "and if no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade," she said in a statement.
The latest IEA projections see coal consumption nearly catching oil consumption in four years time, rising to 4.32 billion tonnes of oil equivalent in 2017 against 4.4 billion tonnes for oil.
That has consequences for climate change as coal produces far more carbon emissions responsible for global warming than other fuels.
But the IEA report on coal found that even countries which have committed themselves to reducing carbon emissions are finding it difficult to resist the renewed allure of coal.
A number of European countries have seen their use of coal for electricity consumption jump at the beginning of this year, including by 65 per cent in Spain, 35 per cent in Britain and 8 per cent in Germany.
The shale gas boom in the United States has led to a slump in coal prices there and subsequently on the market in Europe, where natural gas remains expensive.
This gave a price advantage to coal beginning last year, with the low price of polluting in Europe's emission trading scheme also a contributing factor.
"Low coal prices, supported by a low (emissions) price resulted in a significant gas-to-coal switch in Europe," said the report.
European countries have been slow to exploit shale gas deposits, concerned about possible environmental damage, but the IEA pointed out that the US experience shows that tapping it can bring benefits from lower coal use as well as lower electricity costs.
"Europe, China and other regions should take note," said van der Hoeven.
Moreover, the IEA report doesn't foresee within the next five years the widespread take-up of technology to capture and store underground carbon emissions from burning coal.
Van der Hoeven warned that "coal faces the risk of a potential climate policy backlash" unless there is technological progress or a replication of the US experience.
The IEA, the energy advisory arm of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development of 34 industrialised nations, sees non-OECD developing countries as driving the increase in coal consumption due to population growth and rising electricity consumption as their economies grow and modernise.
In its baseline scenario, the IEA sees rapid increases in power generation making India the second-largest coal consumer in 2017, displacing the United States where the shale gas boom makes coal uncompetitive.
Chinese coal consumption is forecast to account for more than half of global demand by 2014, with the country also displacing the United States as the biggest coal polluter on a per-capita basis.
The IEA sees China's coal demand increasing by an average of 3.7 per cent per year to 3,190 million tonnes of coal equivalent in 2017.
Even in the case of a slowdown in the breakneck growth in the Chinese economy the IEA sees the country's use of coal growing by 2 per cent per year, as well as the overall coal market growing.
The agency said that given its position developments in the Chinese market would largely determine the course of the global coal market, saying: "China is coal. Coal is China."
The IEA believes that current mining and port expansion projects are sufficient to meet China's rising needs, but expressed concern if the current low prices and uncertainties about the economic outlook make investors overly cautious.
Cancellations or a slowdown in "development projects might lead to tightened international coal markets" in the next five years, the IEA warned.
The report sees only the United States making reductions on coal-based carbon emissions on per capita and per economic output measures thanks to cheap gas displacing coal.
Increased coal use pushes up China's emissions on a per capita basis, displacing the United States as the top polluter.
However. China is also seen as making the most gains in emissions efficiency, followed by the United States.
Neither the Europe nor India are forecast to make considerable gains in emissions efficiency.
NEWTOWN, Conn. Family members have gathered for the first of eight funerals for school shooting victims to be held at a Catholic church in Newtown, Conn.
A motorcade of dozens of vehicles led by police motorcycles accompanied the family of 6-year-old James Mattioli to St. Rose of Lima on Tuesday. His funeral comes a day after two other 6-year-old boys were laid in the first of a long, almost unbearable procession of funerals.
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Holiday week is full of funerals for Newtown, Conn.
Margarita Rosniak and her 10-year-old daughter, Charlotte, watched from the sidewalk as people entered the church. They had traveled from California for a Christmas vacation in New York and came to Newtown to join the residents in their grief.
Clutching her daughter close, Margarita Rosniak spoke of sympathizing with the parents. Her daughter says she plans to do a school project on the massacre. She asks, "What was the point of it? They're just little kids."
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Funerals begin for Conn. shooting victims
Meanwhile, a funeral for another of the 20 innocent children killed - 6-year-old Jessica Rekos - was also scheduled for Tuesday. Her family says she loved horses and had just asked Santa for new cowgirl boots and a cowgirl hat, CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston reported.
Security remained high, and the small, affluent Connecticut community was still on edge as the rest of the country prepared for the Christmas holidays.
"There's going to be no joy in school," said 17-year-old P.J. Hickey. "It really doesn't feel like Christmas anymore." But he added, "This is where I feel the most at home. I feel safer here than anywhere else in the world."
In a sign of investors distancing themselves from gun makers, private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management announced it would sell its stake in major arms manufacturer Freedom Group. It said in a statement, "It is apparent that the Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level."
The mystery of why a smart but severely withdrawn 20-year-old, Adam Lanza, shot his mother to death in bed before rampaging through Sandy Hook Elementary, killing 20 children ages 6 and 7, was as deep as ever.
Sandy Hook Elementary will remain closed indefinitely.
Investigators say Lanza had no ties to the school he attacked, and they have found no letters or diaries that could explain why he targeted it. He forced into the school shortly after its front door locked as part of a new security measure. He wore all black and is believed to have used a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle, a civilian version of the military's M-16. Versions of the AR-15 were outlawed in the U.S. under the 1994 assault weapons ban, but the law expired in 2004.
Debora Seifert, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said both Lanza and his mother fired at shooting ranges and visited ranges together.
At the White House on Monday, spokesman Jay Carney said curbing gun violence is a complex problem that will require a "comprehensive solution." He did not mention specific proposals to follow up on President Barack Obama's call for "meaningful action."
New York City's billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, perhaps the most outspoken advocate for gun control in U.S. politics, again pressed Obama and Congress to toughen gun laws and tighten enforcement.
"If this doesn't do it," he asked, "what is going to?"
At least one senator, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, said Monday that the attack has led him to rethink his opposition to the ban on assault weapons. And West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is an avid hunter and lifelong member of the powerful National Rifle Association, said it's time to move beyond the political rhetoric and begin an honest discussion about reasonable restrictions on guns.
In Newtown on Monday, minds were on mourning.
Two funeral homes filled for Jack Pinto and the youngest victim, Noah Pozner, who turned 6 just two weeks ago..
A rabbi presided at Noah's service, and in keeping with Jewish tradition, the boy was laid to rest in a simple brown wooden casket with a Star of David on it.
"I will miss your perpetual smile, the twinkle in your dark blue eyes, framed by eyelashes that would be the envy of any lady in this room," Noah's mother, Veronique Pozner, said at the service, according to remarks the family provided to The Associated Press. Both services were closed to the news media.
Noah's twin, Arielle, who was assigned to a different classroom, survived the killing frenzy.
At 6-year-old Jack Pinto's Christian service, hymns rang out from inside the funeral home, where the boy lay in an open casket.
In the middle of town, an ever-growing memorial has become a pilgrimage site for strangers who want to pay their respect.
One man told CBS Station WCBS why he visited: "Because I'm a dad with four beautiful daughters, when I found out it broke my heart. It's hard to sleep, I don't know how to feel."
Authorities say Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, at their home and then took her car and some of her guns to the school, where he broke in and opened fire. A Connecticut official said the mother, a gun enthusiast who practiced at shooting ranges, was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle.
Lanza was wearing all black, with an olive-drab utility vest with lots of pockets, during the attack.
As investigators worked to figure out what drove him to lash out with such fury -- and why he singled out the school -- federal agents said he had fired guns at shooting ranges over the past several years but that there was no evidence he did so recently as practice for the rampage.
Debora Seifert, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said both Lanza and his mother fired at shooting ranges, and also visited ranges together.
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"We do not have any indication at this time that the shooter engaged in shooting activities in the past six months," Seifert said.
Investigators have found no letters or diaries that could explain the attack.
Whatever his motives, normalcy will be slow in revisiting Newtown.
Classes were canceled district-wide Monday, though other students in town were expected to return to class Tuesday.
Dan Capodicci, whose 10-year-old daughter attends the school at St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, said he thinks it's time for her to get back to classes.
"It's the right thing to do. You have to send your kids back. But at the same time I'm worried," he said. "We need to get back to normal."
Gina Wolfman said her daughters are going back to their seventh- and ninth-grade classrooms tomorrow. She thinks they are ready to be back with their friends.
"I think they want to be back with everyone and share," she said.
Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said whether to send children to school is a personal decision for every parent.
"I can't imagine what it must be like being a parent with a child that young, putting them on a school bus," Sinko said.
The district has made plans to send surviving Sandy Hook students to Chalk Hill, a former middle school in the neighboring town of Monroe. Sandy Hook desks that will fit the small students are being taken there, empty since town schools consolidated last year, and tradesmen are donating their services to get the school ready within a matter of days.
"These are innocent children that need to be put on the right path again," Monroe police Lt. Brian McCauley said.
With Sandy Hook Elementary still designated a crime scene, state police Lt. Paul Vance said it could be months before police turn the school back over to the district.
The shooting has put schools on edge across the country.
Anxiety ran high enough in Ridgefield, Conn., about 20 miles from Newtown, that officials ordered a lockdown at schools after a person deemed suspicious was seen at a train station.
Two schools were locked down in South Burlington, Vt., because of an unspecified threat. A high school in Windham, N.H., was briefly locked down after an administrator heard a loud bang, but a police search found nothing suspicious.
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