Shootings, School Shooting | featured news

School employees in San Antonio, Texas, are being offered free self-defense courses from a local gym.

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."

While guns have been a common denominator in mass slayings at schools by teens, there’s another familiar element that seems increasingly to be minimized. Some 90 percent of school shootings over more than a decade have been linked to a widely prescribed type of antidepressant called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, according to British psychiatrist Dr. David Healy, a founder of RxISK.org, an independent website for researching and reporting on prescription drugs.

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.

The man who committed mass murder in a Connecticut elementary school attended it in 2002.

Gun control advocates marched to the National Rifle Association's Capitol Hill office on Monday, in an effort to pressure the powerful organization to stop standing in the way of reform.

A handful of pro-gun Democrats showed signs of willingness to consider strengthening regulations on firearms, but that might not mean anything without the cooperation of Republicans, whose senior leaders and rank-and-file members have been mute about their interest in cooperating in such a legislative effort.