[He] offers a blueprint for his laptop computer and provides YouTube links to a commercial for a laughing doll from the 1970s and for The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronics band that played in ShowBiz Pizza locations in the 1980s.

In one thread on the website thehighroad.org in October 2009 at 1 a.m., the poster believed to be Lanza asks whether a ban on a certain semiautomatic pistol might extend to other weapons.

Another poster suggests that he ask the Connecticut State Police.

"I always prefer asking through proxy when I can avoid speaking to someone directly. I was just wondering if anyone knew because I have a fetish for .32 ACP," the poster suspected to be Lanza responds, referring to ammunition.

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The only public shooting range in Manhattan is tucked away in the basement of a commercial building at 20 West 20th Street. After passing through the lobby and descending a winding staircase, I came to a long corridor whose green walls are adorned with framed newspaper clippings, photos and painted-on golden bullets pointing the way. The muffled blasts of gunfire grew louder as I got closer.

Inside, the long rectangular room had a utilitarian array of chairs, tables, sofas, TVs, lockers and notices on the walls—

“NO Magnums,”

“Wear Eye and Ear Protection,”

“NRA Gun Safety Rules.”

The firing range’s fourteen shooting stalls run the length of the room, sealed off by a wall with large windows.

I visited the Westside Rifle & Pistol Range because I was intrigued that such a place could exist in one of the least gun-friendly cities in the country. I was curious about the rare breed of New Yorker who is licensed to own a gun.

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The Guardian reports that a Denver-based company, Elite Sterling Security, has sold 300 bulletproof backpacks over the last two months. The company has also received inquiries about their backpacks from 2,000 families across the U.S. And the company is in talks with schools in Colorado about “equipping them with ballistic safety vests, a scaled-down version of military uniforms designed to hang in classroom cupboards for children to wear in an emergency,”The Guardian reports.

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Voters turned down the $72 million school budget by 482 votes and rejected the $39 million town government budget by 62 votes Tuesday. Nearly 4,500 residents voted on the plans, which would have increased spending by 4.7 percent next fiscal year.

Officials put an extra $1 million in the school and town budgets to hire extra police officers and unarmed security guards to put in each of Newtown's seven schools. The plan was spurred by the shootings that killed 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

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The episode that was to air next week features a character, played by guest star Molly Shannon, who brainwashes children to kill other children.

"Hannibal" executive producer Bryan Fuller asked NBC to pull the episode, citing the Newtown, Conn., school shooting in December and this week's Boston Marathon attack, NBC spokesman Stuart Levine said.

The episode, the fourth for the freshman series, will be replaced by another "Hannibal" hour. Viewers will not see a plot continuity issue, Levine said.

But a "clip package" with scenes from the unaired episode will be available at NBC.com next week, without the scenes of child violence and with commentary by Fuller.

"Hannibal" stars Mads Mikkelsen as the title character, the brilliant cannibalistic killer seen on the big screen in "The Silence of the Lambs" and its sequel and introduced in the Thomas Harris novel "Red Dragon." Hugh Dancy and Laurence Fishburne also star in the drama.

There have been other instances of networks responding quickly to the potentially difficult overlap between fact and fiction.

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Sensory overload, of course, is the deafening effect of the Catastrophe Aftermath, one of the last unifying and consistent rituals in our atomized nation. Yes, regardless of whether the tragedy is a school shooting or a terrorist attack, the epilogues of these now-constant mass casualty events have become prepackaged productions that seem less like reality than scripted television dramas.

You know how it goes. Cable outlets blare breaking news chyrons. Twitter explodes with declarations that we are "all from (insert city name) today." Websites post videos of viscera and other disaster porn. Pundits wildly speculate about perpetrators. The president promises justice. Law enforcement press conferences review body counts. Municipal officials insist the community will "stand united." Funerals commence. A media icon says something outrageous. Other media carnival barkers then react to the bombast. Ultimately, the whole episode becomes another excuse to limit civil liberties and is forgotten by all but those personally affected.

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Wednesday's vote was a jarring blow to the drive to curb firearms sparked by December's massacre of children and staff at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. President Barack Obama made broadened background checks the centerpiece of his gun control proposals.

The roll call was also a victory for the National Rifle Association, which opposed the plan as an ineffective infringement on gun rights.

The proposal would have required background checks for all transactions at gun shows and online. Currently they must occur for sales handled by licensed gun dealers.

The system is designed to keep criminals and people with mental problems from getting guns.

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In the hours since the two explosions rocked the streets of Boston, messages of love and support have saturated the internet — but these inspiring and compassionate posts were not universal.

In fact, the commentary streaming across the Twitter feed of the Westboro Baptist Church was both hostile and hateful.

The Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, Kansas, is a small, virulently homophobic, anti-Semitic hate group that regularly stages protests or pickets institutions and individuals they think support homosexuality or otherwise subvert what they believe is God’s law.

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Obama's gun control proposals have run into resistance on Capitol Hill, leaving their fate in doubt. Efforts by Senate Democrats to reach compromise with Republicans over expanding required federal background checks have yet to yield an agreement, and conservatives were promising to try blocking the Senate from even beginning debate on gun control legislation.

"The day Newtown happened was the toughest day of my presidency," Obama said in an emotional speech from Connecticut's capital, an hour's drive from Newtown. "But I've got to tell you, if we don't respond to this, that'll be a tough day for me too."

Some of the Sandy Hook families are making an attempt to push through the bill. Obama met with them privately before his speech at the University of Hartford Monday evening, then brought 12 family members back to Air Force One for the trip back to Washington. The relatives want to meet with senators who've yet to back the legislation to encourage their support in memory of their loved ones.

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The proposal includes new registration requirements for existing magazines that carry 10 or more bullets, something of a disappointment for some family members of Newtown victims who wanted an outright ban on the possession of all high-capacity magazines and traveled to the state Capitol on Monday to ask lawmakers for it.

The package also creates what lawmakers said is the nation's first statewide dangerous weapon offender registry, creates a new "ammunition eligibility certificate," imposes immediate universal background checks for all firearms sales, and extends the state's assault weapons ban to 100 new types of firearms and requires that a weapon have only one of several features in order to be banned.

The newly banned weapons could no longer be bought or sold in Connecticut, and those legally owned already would have to be registered with the state, just like the high-capacity magazines.

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Obama, flanked by grim-faced mothers who have lost their children to guns, said Washington must do something after the tragic mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., three months ago. He called out to the families of four children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School sitting in his audience.

"Shame on us if we've forgotten," Obama said. "I haven't forgotten those kids."

Obama's event comes as gun control legislation faces an uncertain future, even though more than 80 percent of people say in polling they support expanded background checks. Backed by a $12 million TV advertising campaign financed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, gun control groups scheduled rallies around the country Thursday aimed at pressuring senators to back the effort.

Obama said the upcoming vote is the best chance in more than a decade to reduce gun violence. He encouraged Americans, especially gun owners, to press lawmakers home from a congressional spring break to "turn that heartbreak into something real."

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Nearly 15 weeks have passed since the shooting in Newtown. I spent the morning of Friday, December 14 feverishly collecting scant pieces of information about an incident in my hometown. As the details emerged, I did my best to shun the lurid images rushing to my mind. A massacre that could rival the most gruesome spectacle in any modern war had somehow unfolded in the elementary school I had attended as a child. I imagined the terror and anguish that must have gripped every parent with a child at Sandy Hook, then thought of the innumerable family members whose lives would never be the same after that day. It was the most sadistic act of madness imaginable visited upon the most innocent place I could think of.

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Town residents say the automated calls from the NRA began last week and urge people to tell their state legislators to oppose gun control proposals. Lawmakers are debating whether to ban military-style assault weapons, prohibit high-capacity ammunition magazines and other measures in response to the school shootings.

Dan O'Donnell lives in the Sandy Hook section of Newtown and told WVIT-TV that the robocalls are "ridiculous and insensitive."

Messages seeking comment were left with the NRA, which like other nonprofit groups is allowed to make robocalls under federal law.

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Arms manufacturers Smith & Wesson,  Cabela's and Big 5 all boasted sterling third quarter results in the post-Sandy Hook gun boom. A number of big retail chains moved to end sales of AR-15s and similar assault weapons in the wake of the shooting and Cerberus Capital, the New York firm that owned Bushmaster, sold the company, calling the Connecticut shooting a "watershed event." But a small number of hedge funds, accustomed to a sadly familiar pattern (gun massacre, leads to fear of gun bans, leads to mass gun sales), moved to make bank on the tragedy and this predictable trajectory.

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Chris Frantz, the former Talking Heads drummer, volunteered his Fairfield County, Conn., home studio for the Newtown students' "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and admitted he initially felt trepidation about working with a small group of Sandy Hook students. "I wondered, 'How is this going to be perceived by people on the outside?'" he told Salon. "But as soon as the children showed up at our home, I knew it was a unique and important opportunity."

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We stared.

We watched our little girls as they skipped into school in their sparkly headbands and princess sneakers, backpacks banging against the backs of their legs because they themselves were so tiny. We watched our boys at their basketball games, forgetting the scoreboard and just watching them, their knobby knees and puppy energy, their exuberant fist-bumps and crooked grins.

We held them on our laps until they protested, pulled them close until they gave us funny looks. When we hugged them, we could feel their tiny shoulder blades; it was like hugging a fairy.

We were struck by how big they wanted to be, and how small and fragile they really were.

And we tried to figure out what to do -- what to do about gun violence in America.

*  * *

Judging from some news outlets, you might have thought there were only two choices, each on furthest outposts of the spectrum: a) arming every man, woman and child to the teeth with as much hardcore weaponry as possible, or b) piling every single gun in America onto the USS Kum-Ba-Yah and sinking it at sea under a wreath of daisies.

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This week, filmmaker Jonathan Bucari headed to Connecticut – and to a town just 20 miles from the scene of December's shooting -- to begin preliminary work on "Illness," a small, independent feature about a mentally disturbed 13-year-old boy whose life becomes more unhinged after the massacre. Bucari told reporters this week he chose Ridgefield because "it has the same look and feel as Newtown."

The reaction to the film has been swift and so far strongly negative. Ridgefield film commissioner Allison Stockel told Newtown Patch.com that she's received "at least 25 calls from angry residents asking about the film" this week, and the town's First Selectman Rudy Marconi's office announced it "would never approve the filming of a movie related to the subject of the Newtown shooting."

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Just down the road from the scene of the December school massacre in Newtown, Conn., police in Stamford have discovered a home filled with bomb-making materials, assorted firearms and white supremacist and anti-police propaganda.

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Even more outrageous: the auction is being run by the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police for its cadet training program.

Nicholas J. Giaccone Jr., the Hanover, N.H., chief of police, told the New York Times that he cursed at his computer when he Googled the Ruger SR-556C, one of 31 guns the organization (along with two New Hampshire gun makers) is raffling.

"It's an assault rifle," Giaccone said.

Many state lawmakers and gun-control supporters are also stunned that a law enforcement organization would get behind a fundraiser involving guns like this so close after Sandy Hook and during a divisive national debate over gun control. But organizers don't see the problem -- and some supporters even charge critics with playing politics.

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