In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, a New Jersey columnist urges people and politicians to fight for stronger gun control laws. "Every time there is a mass shooting, we shake our heads and bemoan the tragic violence. We wonder aloud why our elected officials cannot stanch the flow of weapons. We rue the fact that there are so many troubled individuals out there, desperate for help and poised to commit terrible crimes, for no apparent reason. But nothing ever changes," she writes. "This holiday season, can we all rise up as one and say ENOUGH?"

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, issued a statement Monday in the wake of last week's school shooting in Newtown, Conn., saying it's time to get assault weapons off the streets. "After a heartbroken weekend where the nation grieved with the families of Newtown, it's time for elected leaders to come together and determine what we can do to help end the culture of violence that is leading to these tragedies," Shaheen said. "We need a comprehensive approach that includes improving access to mental health services, better enforcement of our current laws, and we need to get deadly assault weapons off our streets."

Lines are forming outside funeral homes in Newtown, Fairfield and Monroe, CT as people assemble to pay their respects to three 6-year-olds who were among the 26 victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on Dec. 14. In Newtown, services for Jack Pinto, 6, are set to start at 1 p.m. In Fairfield, mourners gathered for services for Noah Pozner, 6. A wake is scheduled today in Monroe for James Mattioli, 6. The three 6-year-olds are the first of the 26 victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to be laid to rest. Funeral services for the other victims will take place tomorrow and Wednesday.

The controversial Westboro Baptist Church has announced plans to protest outside of the Anne Arundel Circuit Court on Jan 2.—the first day same-sex couples will be able to wed there. "On that day the court starts committing that abomination that brings the shooter like it did in Connecticut," said Shirley Phelps-Roper, the daughter of the church's founder. She also made headlines this weekend when she claimed via Twitter that Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, was sent by God. She told Annapolis Patch, "God keeps sending the shooter."

Reports of a suspicious person at the Branchfield train station in Ridgefield Monday morning brought out police and placed all local schools on lockdown. Authorities, along with a K-9 unit, are canvassing the area after receiving a report of a man with an unknown item slung over his back. Police were first informed of the suspicious person at about 9 a.m.

An unidentified person was reportedly taken into police custody in the vicinity of Upper Dublin High School this morning following a report of a possibly armed subject at the school. Montgomery County Public Safety radio reports indicated one person at the school was in custody at about 9:00 a.m. Numerous police units from surrounding departments had been on their way to the school and were instructed to return to their home jurisdictions. An Upper Dublin Police Department representative said by telephone that the incident was a "misunderstanding" and that students were never in danger. WPVI-TV reported via its Twitter feed that a student's umbrella was mistaken for a firearm.

President Obama took the time to respond to white board notes yesterday at Newtown high school (via @connpost) twitter.com/michaelhayes/s…

The man identified as the gunman who killed 26 children and adults in an elementary school took college classes when he was only 16, a spokesman for Western Connecticut State University said Monday. Paul Steinmetz, spokesman for the Danbury school, confirmed that Adam Lanza earned a 3.26 grade point average while a student there. He dropped out of a German language class and withdrew from a computer science class, but earned an A in a computer class, A-minus in American history and B in macroeconomics. He participated when called on by the teacher in his evening course on introductory German, according to Dot Stasny, who was one of about a dozen other students in the class in the spring of 2009. She said she and a classmate once invited him out to a bar but he declined, saying he was only 17.

My son cradled the iPad and scanned The New York Times article I had downloaded: "A Gunman, Recalled as Intelligent and Shy, Who Left Few Footprints in Life." It said mass murderer Adam Lanza may have had Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. Tyler is an Aspie. He shrugged. “If you meet somebody with Asperger’s,” he said, “you’ve only met one person with Asperger’s.” Tyler's point is worth us all noting: Don’t overgeneralize. Don’t stigmatize in a rush to explain inexplicable evil. Autism didn't cause this tragedy: Asperger’s is a blip on the far-reaching autism spectrum and no two cases are the same. Just as no “typical” person deserves to be tar-brushed with the evil acts of another, Aspies don’t deserve the bad press they’re getting.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), one of the strongest backers of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the Democratic Party, said it is time to sit down and have a "sensible, reasonable" debate about gun control in light of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., and expressed an openness to banning assault weapons. "It's time to move beyond rhetoric. We need to sit down and have a common-sense discussion and move in a reasonable way. ... Everything has to be on the table," Manchin said in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Monday, adding that he had just come from deer hunting with his family. Manchin's comments are significant because he has a "A" rating from the NRA for his pro-gun positions, and the organization endorsed him as recently as October 2012.

Worshippers have hurriedly left a church in Newtown, Conn., saying there was a bomb threat. Police in SWAT gear arrived at the St. Rose of Lima Church not far from the elementary school where 20 kids and six adults were killed Friday. There was no official report from police about a threat or evacuation.

"Our hearts go out to the families and friends who lost loved ones and to all those who were injured. Our family is grieving along with all those who have been affected by this enormous tragedy. No words can truly express how heartbroken we are. We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why. We have cooperated fully with law enforcement and will continue to do so. Like so many of you, we are saddened, but struggling to make sense of what has transpired."

A glimpse of some of those who died: VICTORIA SOTO She beams in snapshots. Her enthusiasm and cheer was evident. She was doing, those who knew her say, what she loved. And now, Victoria Soto is being called a hero. Though details of the 27-year-old teacher's death remained fuzzy, her name has been invoked again and again as a portrait of selflessness and humanity among unfathomable evil. Investigators informed relatives that she was killed while shielding her first-graders from danger. She reportedly hid some students in a bathroom or closet, ensuring they were safe, a cousin, Jim Wiltsie, told ABC News.

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton Tweeted the helicopters people heard over Danbury today were an advance team setting up for a possible presidential visit early next week. "We don't know when at this point," Boughton said. The helicopters visited Danbury Municipal Airport and other locations in the city. The mayor didn't know if the helicopters visited Newtown yet. "Those helicopters you hear are the Presidential advance team. No details on what day the President is coming," was one of the mayor's Tweets. Airport Administrator Paul Estefan declined to say anything at all about the helicopters or the president or any visit. Estefan said when President Clinton visited Danbury, the advance team arrived three months before the visit. "They are scouting landing locations. He's not with them," Boughton Tweeted, referring to the president.

DANBURY, Conn. -- It was a call they had often prepared for, but hoped never to take. Shortly after 10 a.m. Friday, doctors in the emergency room at Danbury Hospital received word of a school shooting in nearby Newtown. Reports were scattered. No one knew at first whether it was a high school or an elementary school. No one knew how many patients to expect. But within 10 minutes, 80 doctors, nurses and other staff members were ready for anything, prepping trauma teams, four emergency rooms and six operating rooms. One of those on watch: The chairman of the pediatric department. Just 12 miles down the road from Sandy Hook Elementary School, and charged by the state with handling mass casualty events, the doctors at Danbury knew that if many were hurt, the victims would be coming through their emergency room doors. At around 10:30 a.m., three patients arrived, one after the other. As a fraction of the medical professionals on hand swung into action, the rest waited tensely. Overseeing it was Dr. Patrick Broderick, the hospital's chairman of emergency medicine. Around midday, as the unbearable scope of the tragedy was becoming clear to the world, Broderick received another call. There would be no more patients.

WASHINGTON — A law enforcement official says some guns owned by the mother of the gunman in the Connecticut elementary school rampage match the models of the guns used in the shooting. The official cautions that investigators haven't conclusively linked the guns used in the rampage to the ones the woman owned. The official says state police records show the woman had legally purchased five firearms and all were registered in Connecticut. Authorities are still trying to account for all the guns. The official was not authorized to speak to reporters about the investigation and spoke only on condition of anonymity. Authorities say the woman's 20-year-old son killed her Friday, then opened fire inside the school in Newtown, massacring 26 people, including 20 children, then killed himself.

WASHINGTON -- Friday's shooting in Newtown, Conn., put the spotlight on President Barack Obama politically and, for many people, it was personal, as dozens turned up outside the White House gates begging him to take action on gun control. Activists, sympathetic parents, and those affected by gun violence in the past gathered to collectively grieve at the impromptu vigil. They chanted, lit candles handed out by advocacy groups, and pleaded for political action in the wake of the latest episode of gun violence to afflict the nation. The shooting of a reported 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School left people looking for not just answers, but an outlet. Jennifer Oko was among those who came to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to light a candle and call on the president to move gun control legislation. A New Yorker who now lives in D.C., Oko is the mother to a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old who are in kindergarten and first grade, respectively. She said she was torn as to whether to go home and see her kids immediately after work or come to the White House to attend the vigil. "I felt I needed to show solidarity," she said.

Residents describe the town of Sandy Hook as a tight-knit, quiet community with elaborate Halloween and Christmas displays, little crime and the last place on earth you would expect a mass school shooting to happen. On Friday, just hours after a gunman shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School -- many of them children -- former and current residents said they were shocked and devastated. Facts were few and far between late Friday afternoon. The shooter had been identified as Adam Lanza, The New York Times reported. While neither the victims' names nor the shooter’s motive have been released by police, residents of Yogananda Street in Sandy Hook, Conn., were on lockdown Friday afternoon as police cruisers and an ambulance rushed to a home on the street where the shooter or his parents are believed to have lived or are currently living.

EXCLUSIVE: First photo of #Newtown, CT shooting suspect Adam Lanza circa 2005. Live updates: abcn.ws/UMG79i twitter.com/ABC/status/279…

"Evil visited this community today and it's too early to speak of recovery, but each parent, each sibling, each member of the family has to understand that Connecticut — we're all in this together. We'll do whatever we can to overcome this event."

Sandy Hook Elementary first grade teacher Kaitlin Roig was worried that she and her students would not survive the gunfire that flew through the Connecticut school Friday morning. Roig told ABC News that she quickly ushered her first grade students into the class bathroom and held the door shut with a storage unit. When police came to rescue them, Roig refused to unlock the door, worried that it was a trick by the gunman to lure them out. The teacher told the police on the other side to slide their badges under the bathroom door to prove their identities. "I didn't believe them," she told ABC News. "I told them if they were cops, they could get the key... They did and then unlocked the bathroom." Despite the horror of what was happening around them and being locked in a small space, the teacher explained that she kept a positive face on for the sake of her young students.

Many media organizations, using apparently faulty information provided to them by law enforcement sources, issued conflicting reports about the identity of the shooter behind the massacre at the elementary school in Connecticut on Friday. Outlets, starting with CNN, initially reported that the man who murdered at least 26 people was named Ryan Lanza. However, hours later, those outlets were forced to retract that identification. The New York Post and Fox News were the first to report that Adam Lanza, Ryan's brother, was the shooter. They were followed by outlets including CNN, CBS, the Associated Press and the New York Times.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg called on President Barack Obama to take “immediate action” following Friday’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which reportedly left at least 27 dead, including 20 children. In a statement released Friday afternoon, Bloomberg noted that Obama rightly sent his condolences to the families in Newtown, but urged the president to immediately introduce reforms that would create more restrictions around gun control. He is the co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition of more than 600 mayors who support gun control initiatives, through which he issued the statement.

After the tragic shooting Friday morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that left more than 20 people dead and injured, religious communities of Southern Connecticut are responding with prayer, vigils and spiritual counseling for victims' friends and families and those affected. A little more than a mile away from the school, St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church will hold a prayer vigil at 7 p.m. Thursday for families and victims. The church will be open all night for prayer. "We offer our prayers and our collective sense of grief, shock and loss," said Msgr. Jerald A. Doyle, administrator of the Diocese of Bridgeport, which oversees St. Rose of Lima and other Newtown Catholic churches, in a statement. Doyle said that priests from the diocese, including those from St. Rose, had been dispatched to the scene after the shooting to minister to children and families.

RT @jbendery WH vigil. #Newtown twitter.com/jbendery/statu…

One of the signs already outside the WH lockerz.com/s/268969323

I'm told Adam Lanza, 20, was the shooter but may have been carrying 24-yr-old brother Ryan"s ID, leading to confusion.

"With all the carnage from gun violence in our country, it's still almost impossible to believe that a mass shooting in a kindergarten class could happen. It has come to that. Not even kindergarteners learning their A,B,Cs are safe. We heard after Columbine that it was too soon to talk about gun laws. We heard it after Virginia Tech. After Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek. And now we are hearing it again. For every day we wait, 34 more people are murdered with guns. Today, many of them were five-year olds. President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown. But the country needs him to send a bill to Congress to fix this problem. Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership - not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response. My deepest sympathies are with the families of all those affected, and my determination to stop this madness is stronger than ever."

"To all our families. All is fine at Little Explorers. We are in lockdown. Only parents are allowed in the building. All the children are fine."

Reuters photo from scene of Connecticut school shooting [REUTERS/Michelle McLoughlin] bit.ly/Z5RP7u twitter.com/Reuters/status…

We are here to care for any victims and their families in any way they need us. Our hearts and prayers are extended to anyone involved in this terrible tragedy. To date, three patients have been transported to Danbury Hospital from the scene. Out of abundance of caution and not because of any direct threat Danbury Hospital is under lockdown. This allows us simply to focus on the important work at hand. We will keep you apprised of any additional information as details are confirmed.

One child leaving the school said that there was shattered glass everywhere. A police officer ran into the classroom and told them to run outside and keep going until the reach the firehouse.

View more videos at: http://nbcconnecticut.com.