With their original school still being treated as a crime scene, the students will begin attending classes at a refurbished school in the neighboring town of Monroe on Thursday. Law enforcement officers have been guarding the new school, and by the reckoning of police, it is "the safest school in America."

Still, Newtown Superintendent Janet Robinson said officials will do their best to make the students feel at ease.

"We will go to our regular schedule," she said. "We will be doing a normal day."

On Wednesday, the students and their families were welcomed at an open house at their new school, which was formerly the Chalk Hill Middle School in Monroe but renamed as the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Students received gift boxes with toys inside and shared joyful reunions with teachers.

One father, Vinny Alvarez, took a moment to thank his third-grade daughter's teacher, Courtney Martin, who protected the class from a rampaging gunman by locking her classroom door and keeping the children in a corner.

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Ohio-based Buckeye Firearms Foundation has launched an Armed Teacher Training curriculum to offer gun training to teachers and school workers. According to Ohio's Fox 19, "As of Wednesday, the Armed Teacher Training Program has attracted more than 600 applicants from several states including Ohio, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and West Virginia." More than one-third of the 600 applicants are female.

According to Fox, the program, which will officially launch in Spring 2013, will take teachers through intensive gun training and will have course attendees take the same firearms test as law enforcement officers.

[h/t Think Progress]

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According to the Delhi police department, 274 Delhi women have applied for gun licenses and some 1,200 more have called the licensing department to inquire. "These include not only the average working woman, but even students who travel long distances to colleges and even their concerned parents. They were eager to find out more on the procedure to acquire arms," a Delhi police officer told the Times of India.

India's restrictive gun laws require a "grave and imminent threat" to the applicant's life in order to be approved, making gun ownership rare. The 274 applications received in the last three weeks amount to more than half of the applications submitted in 2011.

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The Rockland County Times reports that "according to police reports on public record, Journal News Rockland Editor Caryn A. McBride was alarmed by the volume of 'negative correspondence'" she received following the publishing of the data, "namely an avalanche of phone calls and emails to the Journal News office."

The police, however, dimissed McBride's concerns, one of which was based on an email that questioned "what McBride would get in her mail now.” Police said that the email  “did not constitute an offense" or they did not consider it a threat, prompting McBride to hire a private investigation firm.

h/t Politico

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"It's about living in a world that's safe," New Haven attorney Irving Pinsky told The Associated Press on Saturday. "The answer is about protecting the kids."

Pinsky asked this week to sue the state, which has immunity against most lawsuits unless it gives a party permission to go forward with a claim. Connecticut's claims commissioner couldn't be reached for comment Saturday.

Pinksy's client, whom he calls "Jill Doe" in the claim, sustained "emotional and psychological trauma and injury" on Dec. 14 after gunman Adam Lanza forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and gunned down 20 children and six adults inside in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

The child heard "conversations, gunfire and screaming" over Sandy Hook's intercom after someone in the office apparently switched on the system, according to the claim. Pinsky said Saturday he didn't know whether his client saw anyone die.

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The Chicago Tribune reported that "homicides were up 17 percent over last year in Chicago, and shootings had increased by 11 percent, according to police statistics." The Tribune, giving little by the way of explanation, cited unseasonable weather early in the year as a factor contributing to an unusually high humber in murders:

Largely contributing to the spike was the unusual number of homicides that occurred during the early part of the year, when the  city experienced unseasonable warmth. In the first three months of the year, homicides ran about 60 percent ahead of the 2011 rate.

Commenting Friday on the 500th homicide, Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the total "an unfortunate and tragic milestone, which not only marks a needless loss of life but serves as a reminder of the damage that illegal guns and conflicts between gangs cause in our neighborhoods."

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Earlier this week, the White Plains Journal News ran a story with the provocative title "The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don't Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood." The story, written by Dwight R. Worley, made few bones about its slant, opening with the chilling details of the shooting murder of a Katona woman last spring.

But it wasn't the story that raised eyebrows. It was the revelation that after a Freedom of Information request, "Westchester provided the names and addresses of the county’s 16,616 active permit holders" to the paper. And, even worse, its online version featured an interactive map of all the "pistol permits registered with the Westchester County Clerk's Office," along with the invitation to "zoom in and out for more information and click on a dot to see details of a permit." The Journal did also mention, in an editor's note, that writer Dwight R. Worley owns a .357 Magnum. It didn't, however, include his New York City address.

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“I really think what David Gregory did while he was inadvertently flouting the law was illustrating in a very graphic, perhaps not intentionally, but in a graphic way just how silly some of these laws are,” NRA President David Keene said yesterday. We don’t often say this, but the NRA is absolutely right.

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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?”

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Even Gregory, who convincingly played a devil's advocate to LaPierre Sunday, was dismissive of its effect on Sunday. “I mean the fact that that it just doesn't work is still something that you're challenged by if you want to approach this legislation again,” he said of the ban to New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, a supporter of the ban.

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Federal law prohibits gun sales to anyone who was declared mentally unfit by a court. In Bill Clinton’s first term, Congress passed a law requiring states to report these mental health records to the FBI. But in 1997, the Supreme Court threw out that requirement, saying states could share whatever information they wanted to—or more likely not share it.

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“It's the one thing that would keep people safe,” LaPierre continued of his plan, “I said what I honestly thought and...what hundreds of millions of people all over this country believe will actually make a difference." All the evidence available suggests putting armed guns in school is actually not a particularly effective idea (there was an armed Sheriff’s deputy in Columbine High School on the day of the shooting, for instance).

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With a staggering lack of self-awareness, LaPierre blamed public shootings on "genuine monsters" (without questioning how easy it is for these "monsters" to get access to guns), laying the blame squarely on the entertainment industry and the media, whose aim, he said is to "violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year."  He said:

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“The statement by the NRA is without any evidence that it would be effective,” said Dr. Fred Rivara, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and the editor-in-chief of the pediatrics division of the Journal of the American Medical Association, in an email to Salon.

In fact, there was an armed sheriff’s deputy at Columbine High School the day of the shooting. There was an armed citizen in the Clackamas Mall in Oregon during a shooting earlier this month. There was an armed citizen at the Gabby Giffords shooting -- and he almost shot the unarmed hero who tackled shooter Jared Loughner. Virtually every university in the county already has its own police force. Virginia Tech had its own SWAT-like team. As James Brady, Ronald Reagan’s former press secretary cum gun control advocate, often notes, he was shot along with the president, despite the fact that they were surrounded by dozens of heavily armed and well-trained Secret Service agents and police.

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As soon as the speech was over, I went looking for the transcript, which can be found here, but in the first few moments after the news conference, the html line read "Armed police officers in every single school in this nation. This is insanity talking." Apparently, I wasn't alone in the world thinking that Wayne LaPierre was having a moment of psychosis and sociopathy in front of a national audience. And I felt an immediate kinship with the Washington Post news poster.

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Naturally, the NRA was not too amenable to this, and hotel security escorted the protesters and their cardboard boxes filled with signatures to the street. Josh Nelson, an organizer with CREDO, which led the petition effort, said the activists had a simple message to the NRA: “We want them to stand down and get out of the way so Congress and the president can pass gun control legislation that will save lives.”

Nelson and several dozen volunteers had hoped to deliver the petitions to LaPierre and NRA staffers before the press conference. But when they entered the building, “the hotel staff informed us that it’s private property and that we are not welcome there, and they pushed us out the door,” he told Salon. He couldn't be sure that the NRA directed the staff to eject the protesters, or if the hotel was just doing its job to protect its clients.

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Here’s what critics say about him. Lott held prestigious positions at Yale and the University of Chicago, where he published his groundbreaking book, "More Guns, Less Crime." In the early 2000s, his work fell into controversy for employing what some academic critics termed “junk science” and for various apparently fatal methodological flaws. Later, he was unable to prove the existence of a study central to his thesis. He was also caught using a fake “sockpuppet” persona to defend his work and attack his critics online. “In most circles, this goes down as fraud,” Donald Kennedy, the then-editor of the prestigious journal Science wrote in an editorial. Even Michelle Malkin said Lott had shown an “extensive willingness to deceive to protect and promote his work.”

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