School massacre funerals begin

Family, friends and townspeople streamed to two funeral homes to say goodbye to Jack Pinto, who loved the New York Giants football team, and Noah Pozner, who liked to work out how things worked mechanically.

A rabbi presided at Noah’s service, and in keeping with Jewish tradition, the boy was laid to rest in a simple brown wooden coffin adorned with a Star of David.

Outside the funeral home, well-wishers placed two teddy bears, a bouquet of white flowers and a red rose at the base of an old maple tree.

Noah’s twin sister, Arielle, who was assigned to a different classroom, survived.

In front of the funeral home where relatives were mourning Noah, well-wishers placed two teddy bears, a bouquet of white flowers and a single red rose at the base of a maple tree.

Hymns rang out from inside the funeral home where Jack’s service was being held.

“The message was: You’re secure now. The worst is over,” one mourner, Gwendolyn Glover, said.

The boys were being buried a day after the small community of Newtown, already stripping itself of Christmas decorations, came together for a vigil where President Barack Obama said he will use “whatever power” he has to prevent similar massacres.

“What choice do we have?” he said. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”

Mr Obama has given no specifics on what he might do, and White House spokesman Jay Carney today warned that “no single piece of legislation or action will fully address the problem.”

Investigators have offered no motive for the shooting, and the Connecticut community struggled to comprehend what drove 20-year-old Adam Lanza to shoot dead his mother at home in bed on Friday morning, drive her car to the school and open fire on six adults and 20 children who were six and seven-years-old.

All the victims at the school apparently were shot more than once, and some of them were shot at close range, Chief Medical Examiner Dr H Wayne Carver has said. He said the ammunition was the type designed to break up inside a victim’s body and inflict the maximum amount of damage.

Further details on just what happened during Friday’s shooting were “too difficult to discuss,” state police Lt. Paul Vance, standing in a cold rain, told reporters.

“I can tell you it broke our hearts when we couldn’t save them all,” Lt Vance said. He said two adults who were injured were recovering.

He also said police may hold the school and the Lanza home for months as the investigation continues.

Police said Lanza was carrying an arsenal of ammunition big enough to kill just about every student in the school if given enough time. He shot himself in the head just as he heard police drawing near, authorities said.

Newtown officials couldn’t say whether Sandy Hook Elementary would ever reopen. Today’s classes were canceled, and the district was making plans to send surviving students to a former school building in a neighbouring town.

Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said he “would find it very difficult” for students to return to the same school. But, he added, “We want to keep these kids together. They need to support each other.”

Investigators believe Lanza attended Sandy Hook many years ago, but they couldn’t say why he went there on Friday. Authorities said Lanza had no criminal history, and it was not clear whether he had a job.

A spokesman for Western Connecticut State University said Lanza took classes when he was only 16. Paul Steinmetz confirmed that Lanza dropped out of a German language class and withdrew from a computer science class but earned high grades in a computer class, American history and macroeconomics.

A former classmate there, Dot Stasny, said she and a classmate once invited Lanza out to a bar but he declined, saying he was only 17.

“We attributed him being quiet to him being so much younger than the rest of us,” said Ms Stasny, 30. “I assumed he was this super smart kid who was just doing extra course work.”

Divorce paperwork made public today shows that Lanza’s mother had the authority to make all decisions regarding his upbringing. It makes no mention of any mental health issues regarding Lanza. The paperwork says the marriage broke down “irretrievably.” The divorce was finalised in September 2009, when Adam Lanza was 17.

Federal agents have concluded that Lanza visited a local shooting range, but they do not know whether he practised shooting there.

Lanza is believed to have used a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle in the school attack, a civilian version of the military’s M-16. Versions of the AR-15 were outlawed in the United States under the 1994 assault weapons ban. That law expired in 2004, and Congress, in a nod to the political power of the gun-rights lobby, did not renew it.

Gun rights activists have remained largely quiet. In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, defended the sale of assault weapons and said that the principal at Sandy Hook, who authorities say died trying to overtake the shooter, should herself have been armed.

At both funeral homes today, people wrestled with the same questions as the rest of the US – what steps could and should be taken to prevent anything like the massacre from happening again.

“If people want to go hunting, a single-shot rifle does the job, and that does the job to protect your home, too. If you need more than that, I don’t know what to say,” Ray DiStephan said outside Noah’s funeral.

He added: “I don’t want to see my kids go to schools that become maximum-security fortresses. That’s not the world I want to live in, and that’s not the world I want to raise them in.”