A teacher at the Life Learning Academy found Courtni Webb's notebook and reported the poem to the principal who suspended the student. The school district is now deciding whether and when Webb can return to the small vocational school. Webb and her mother have reached out to the media to decry the school's actions.

They told NBC's Today that Webb was simply expressing herself and exploring ideas about helplessness and darkness that she believed were behind the Newtown massacre. "Never in my life have I heard that you couldn't mention a tragedy that happened. I didn't say that I agree with it, I said I simply understand it" Webb told Today, noting that the she felt the school was making her look like "a monster." Her mother said that she believes her daughter's free speech is being violated.

Via NBC:

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

The exercise starts with a militarized baseline, as both shooters unloaded designed-for-damage rounds from high-capacity magazines loaded into assault rifles. Improving their killing efficiency would require one of two things: the ability to shoot more bullets faster, or more time. A fully automatic machine gun would provide the first. More minutes to hunt, meanwhile, might be gained by employing a noise suppressor, those metallic tubes better known as silencers. By muffling the noise generated with every shot by sonic booms and gas release, a silencer would provide a new degree of intimacy for public mass murder, delaying by crucial seconds or minutes the moment when someone calls the police after overhearing strange bangs coming from Theater 4 or Classroom D. The same qualities that make silencers the accessory of choice for targeted assassination offer advantages to the armed psychopath set on indiscriminate mass murder.

Continue Reading...

In an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward, Veronique Pozner shares this alongside other intimate and painful details about her mourning, her son and his relationship with his twin and other siblings.

The six-year-old -- the first Sandy Hook student to be buried because of a Jewish tradition to conduct funerals swiftly -- is described as energetic and academically gifted:

He already knew how to read; he had a vocabulary well beyond his years, using words like “DNA” and “dynamic.”

“He excelled academically,” says [his half-sister] Danielle. “His teachers said he was really, really, smart.”

He was on a constant path of discovery. “It was always, ‘How does this work? Why does this happen?’ He wanted to understand cause and effect,” says Veronique.

Noah also wondered about God, asking his mother, “If God exists then who created God?”

Continue Reading...

Now, the Smoking Gun reports that Riches, a Pennsylvania man serving a five-year probation sentence after having been in custody for wire fraud and conspiracy for the past decade, has been arrested by federal authorities for violating his probation. Riches was not allowed to leave "Eastern District judicial boundaries without permission from a judge or his probation officers," the site reports.

Even stranger, though, are Riches' past crimes. The Smoking Gun writes:

Continue Reading...

“If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” LaPierre said. “I know there’s a media machine in this country that wants to blame guns every time something happens."

Asked by Gregory about specific changes to gun control laws that might have made it harder for Adam Lanza to kill 26 people a week ago Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary school, LaPierre discounted all of them.

"I don't believe that's going to make one difference," he said, when Gregory held up a magazine that allowed Lanza to get off dozens of shots without reloading, and asked whether fewer people might have died if that was banned.

"There are so many ways he could have done it," LaPierre said.

He put the blame on the mentally ill -- and said "we have no national database of these lunatics," and that "these monsters walk the street," he said, because too many have been deinstitutionalized.

Continue Reading...

10 Minutes – Length of time Adam Lanza was shooting

90 (more than) – Number of bullets shot

38 – Number of mass shootings in 2012

$50,000 – Average cost of medical treatment per homicide shooting victim

$2.3 Billion – Total lifetime medical costs for gunshot injuries (as of 1999)

$6 Million – Those medical costs per day

49 Percent – Amount of those lifetime medical costs paid by taxpayers

20 Percent – Number of gun owners with 65 percent of the firearms in the U.S.

36,000 – Number of guns thrown away each year

16,808,538 – Number of applications to purchase guns in the U.S. from January – November 2012 from legal dealers (does not include gun shows or private sales)

5X – Amount this could arm every NATO member state’s armed forces

Continue Reading...

The Journal, in what may be the deepest account yet of the inner workings of the Lanza family reports that:

* Adam Lanza stopped talking with his father, Peter, during summer 2010, which coincided with the time a relationship with Peter Lanza's now-wife turned serious.

* That Christmas, Lanza stopped communicating with his older brother Ryan.

* Nancy Lanza let Adam use her guns at a local shooting range in order to bond with him and "teach him responsibility."

The story suggests Adam Lanza's problems started in first grade, at Sandy Hook (where he attended classes through fourth grade). After a stint of home schooling, he was back in the Newtown system for middle school, but remained shy, socially awkward and isolated from classmates.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

As Rush details on his web site, Lanza -- whose mother, Nancy, was reportedly a doomsday "prepper" -- either couldn't deal with the possibility of the Mayan apocalypse on Friday or wanted to "save people" from it.

As he pushed this theory, Limbaugh had it both ways. "I'm not espousing it, I just want to bounce off of it." Here's how he bounced:

The theory that Adam Lanza somehow had been convinced the world was gonna end Friday and he was discombobulated by it. His mother was a prepper and a survivalist and showed him guns and he went in there and did what he did to either deal with the pressure of it or maybe save people from the end, who knows what.  It happened in China, is the point.

Continue Reading...

If 2011 numbers are predictive, more than 12,000 people will be killed by guns in America this year.

That’s four times the number of people who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet while we mourned together as a nation after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and then went to war against al-Qaida and two sovereign nations, it appears to have taken 20 schoolchildren being gunned down in Connecticut for politicians of either party to challenge the power of the NRA.

And this when even a strong majority of NRA members support common-sense gun control! Exactly how many bodies have to pile up for Washington to find the will to act?

Every day in America, 34 Americans are killed by guns. Every day in America, at least one of those killed is under the age of 14. In the wake of all-too-frequent mass shootings, we tend to ignore the even more frequent, quotidian gun deaths that are devastating our communities, destroying families and endangering our children. Here are just a few stories about lives that might have been saved with sensible gun laws.

Linkin Leatham, 2

Linkin’s parents called their son the “miracle baby” for having overcome several complications at birth and defying doctors’ expectations that he wouldn’t survive.  Then, in September, 2-year-old Linkin picked up his father’s handgun and shot himself in the eye, ultimately dying from his wounds. Linkin’s father is a Utah police officer, though the weapon involved in the shooting was not his service weapon.

Continue Reading...

Assault, armed criminal action and unlawful possession of a weapon charges were filed against 57-year-old Lester Davis of Wentzville following the shooting Tuesday at All Cuts Barber Shop in Wentzville.

A patron made the comment that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School made him want to kill the suspect. For unknown reasons, police say Davis took the comment as a threat and asked, “You want to murder me?”

Davis then allegedly went to his car, retrieved a pistol and fired three times in the customer’s direction. No one was hurt.

Davis turned himself in and is jailed on $400,000 bond.

Continue Reading...

At St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Newtown, a service for first-grader James Mattioli had not concluded when mourners began arriving for the funeral of little Jessica Rekos, the first of eight to be held in the coming days at the church. Several more sets of funerals and visitation hours were set throughout town Wednesday.

Students went back to classes the day before, except for those at Sandy Hook Elementary, where a lone gunman armed with a military-style assault rifle slaughtered the children, six adults and himself by the time Friday's massacre ended. He also killed his mother at her home.

Pupils at Sandy Hook, which serves kindergarten through fourth grade, will resume classes in a formerly shuttered school in a neighboring community after the winter break, the Connecticut Post reported.

Continue Reading...

But Solomon's brilliant "Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity" -- a staple on year-end best book lists -- has been about the only book on my mind since Friday's horrific massacre in Newtown, Conn.

The great genius of Solomon's book comes in its empathy for the parents and children who find themselves in situations they never imagined. There's a chapter on children with autism and Asperger's. And in another, he writes about getting to know the parents of one of the Columbine shooters, Dylan Klebold, as he sought to understand how two loving parents could end up, unknowingly, raising a killer.

Continue Reading...

Then Victoria Soto's memorial overwhelmed me. Two of my daughter's best friends are elementary school teachers; I felt their bravery and vulnerability in a whole new way. On Monday a CNN interview with principal Dawn Hochsprung's teary, 20-something daughter Erica, begging her mother to "come back, just come back" undid me, making me miss my own mother and think about my daughter someday missing me. All of us have multiple identities that let pain find us in many different ways.

The only person I haven't been able to think about is Nancy Lanza, the first victim, shot in her bed with her own gun by her own son, the terminally mentally ill Adam. I shrink from the story despite the fact -- or because of it -- that we had things in common. She was close to my age, divorced, with children in their 20s. But I've been blessed; my daughter is as much a joy today as she was as a first grader.

Continue Reading...

Another small detail emerged in the course of the interview, this time about Adam Lanza.

Lanza was vegan, according to Hanoman, because he "didn’t want to hurt animals.”

You can watch the full interview below.

Continue Reading...

The details seem to form an all-too-familiar profile: the loner, withdrawn, highly intelligent, ghostly pale, awkward but pleasant seeming enough. He wore oversize formal shirts with pens, sheathed in pocket protectors, in their top pockets. In lieu of a photo in his high school yearbook were the words, "camera shy."

His brother, Ryan, called him a "nerd," one of his classmates mother's said he was "one of the goths." He was assigned to a school psychologist when staff at Newtown High School thought he might be a risk to himself, not others.

Continue Reading...

Obama was an Illinois state senator, running for Congress in an urban district, so he didn’t have to worry about appealing to rural voters, let alone red states. The most important gun issue he faced was his failure to fly back to Springfield from a Hawaiian vacation to vote on an anti-gun bill, because his then-18-month-old daughter Malia had an ear infection. The Safe Neighborhoods Act -- which Obama supported -- would have made illegal possession of a firearm a felony. It failed by five votes, but a compromise version passed the next year.

A month before the primary -- which he lost to Rep. Bobby Rush -- I interviewed Obama for the Chicago Reader. We mostly talked about the missed vote, which Obama’s opponents were using as an example of his callowness, but then I asked him about his philosophy on gun control. Here is a previously unpublished transcript of those remarks, which did not make the 2000 piece:

Continue Reading...

CBS News highlighted that Ryan Kraft, who now lives in California, recalled stern warnings from Nancy Lanza, Adam's murdered mother, to never turn his back on Adam, "not even to go to the bathroom." He did not expound upon reasons for these instructions.

Kraft said he was shocked and devastated when he heard news of the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary (also his alma mater). He remembers Adam as an intense, quiet child: "Whenever we were doing something, whether it was building Legos, or playing video games, he was really focused on it. It was like he was in his own world," Kraft said.

Continue Reading...

“Last time we visited with her in person we talked about prepping and, you know, are you ready for what can happen down the line when the economy collapses."

Since then, subsequent reports have suggested Nancy Lanza — the mother and first victim of Newtown, Conn., shooter Adam Lanza — may have been part of a survivalist movement known as "preppers."  And while it may prove impossible to confirm her affiliation in this loosely organized network of gun enthusiasts, back-to-the-land types and the generically cautious, the tragedy at Sandy Hook has invited increased scrutiny.

Continue Reading...