HARTFORD, Conn. — President Barack Obama is poised to make another impassioned pitch for gun control Monday as he travels to Hartford, Connecticut, not far from the site of the massacre that left 20 children and six adults dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

His comments come as the Senate is expected to begin debate as early as this week over proposed firearm legislation.

“On the eve of Senate consideration of gun safety proposals the President will speak, as he did at the State of the Union, about the obligations the nation has to children lost in Newtown and other victims of gun violence to act on these proposals,” a White House official said.

Courtesy of Fox News

Obama will speak in the early evening at the University of Hartford’s sport center. With the campus beginning to be locked down for security, one man with a large banner advocating the president’s gun control proposals told CNN he came all the way from Michigan to show his support.

The Senate is scheduled to soon begin voting on gun control measures, but Democratic sources admit that the gun bill as currently written does not have the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.

For more on this CNN story, click here.

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Adam Lanza, the gunman who attacked a Connecticut elementary school, killing 20 children and six adults, had an arsenal of guns, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition and even samurai swords, knives and a bayonet, according to search warrants released on Thursday.

The warrants outlined what police found in Lanza’s home and car during official searches of the Newton, Conn., home Lanza shared with his mother, who he killed before the Dec. 14 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The attack lasted less than five minutes before the 20-year-old Lanza killed himself with a Glock handgun.

Courtesy Hartford Courant

All 26 victims inside the school were shot to death with a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle, but Lanza had another loaded handgun and three 30-round magazines for the assault rifle. A loaded 12-gauge shotgun was found in the Honda Civic that Lanza drove to the school with two magazines containing 70 rounds of Winchester shotgun rounds, officials said.

The warrants give the most revealing look into Lanza’s world since the shooting that shocked the nation and led to calls to renew a ban on assault weapons and to limit the sale of guns. The Obama administration has also called for limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Congress is expected to consider limited gun-control measures, including universal background checks, when it returns from its spring break.

MILL CREEK — In Snohomish County, there are now armed deputies whose sole focus is to keep school students safe. The special unit was created in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.

It’s the first police unit of its kind in Washington state and might be the first in the nation.

Snohomish County Sheriff John Lovick said, “I was impacted like millions of other people were with the incident at Sandy Hook,” and his new goal was to think outside the box about keeping schools safe in his jurisdiction.

Snohomish County Sheriff John Lovik created a special unit of armed deputies to work inside schools.

Lovick said he decided to create a new police unit strictly dedicated to school safety. “It’s going to be a game changer in this community.”

Several schools around the county already have police stationed as school resource officers, and that will not change.

But the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office’s new unit consists of five armed deputies to cover the schools in unincorporated parts of the county.

But protection costs money.

The sheriff has pulled officers from other units to put five deputies in the schools. He’d like more than 20 in the unit, but the budget would be over $1 million, he said.

He’s now looking to private companies, school boards and the Legislature to help fund it.

“I could have waited, which would have been probably been an easier thing to do, but we don’t have time to wait,” said Lovick. “When you’re looking at young people, when you’re looking at schools, when you’re looking at school safety, there’s no reason to wait.”

Courtesy Fox News

(CNN) — A federal task force looking for ways to curb gun violence will have a set of recommendations by Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden announced Thursday.

Speaking during a week of meetings with disparate groups on various sides of the issue — including some for and others against stricter gun controls — Biden, who oversees the task force, said the recommendations, to be given to President Barack Obama, will serve as a beginning.

“This doesn’t mean it is the end of the discussion, but the public wants us to act,” he told reporters.

Biden said he’s been surprised by how many groups have encouraged universal background checks for all gun owners, including those who purchase through private sales.

Some states have backlogs of thousands of felons who are never registered on lists aimed at helping prevent dangerous weapons from getting into their hands, he noted.

Obama called for the task force after last month’s massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 27 people were killed — 20 of them elementary school children.

For the complete CNN story, go here.

SEATTLE — West Seattle’s Young at Art studio is helping children make snowflakes to send to the students and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary.

As part of a nationwide project, the children are hoping the snowflakes bring cheer to the students at the school.

Photojournalist Reid Johnson shows us how the snowflakes could help heal.

SEATTLE — In the days since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, there has been a lot of talk about how to keep kids safe at school.

Some people say the answer is to put guns in the schools. That way, the argument goes, teachers and other school workers have a fighting chance against an armed attacker.

The debate is as contentious as the gun control debate itself.

Gun rights advocates in Utah are offering free gun training for teachers. Utah Shooting Sports Council says the 200-person, six-hour course was filled to capacity.

“I want to be able to protect my children in case of any assault, any bad guys coming in to attack,” teacher Cori Sorenson said.

In an effort to arm teachers at schools, a firearms group in Ohio is also launching a test program in gun training.

And in Arizona, the state’s attorney general is proposing a change to state law.

There are people with guns inside banks, malls, and government buildings, so Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne says that under the right conditions, “Why not put gun in hands of qualified individuals in our children’s schools?”

“On the one hand, you have people proposing that any teacher that wants to can bring a gun to school. I think that would create more danger than it would solve and I’m opposed to that. You have other people who don’t want to do anything for defense in the schools and I think we would regret that if there was another incident that might have been prevented,” said Horne.

Some law enforcement officers support the idea.

“If you have somebody come in that’s mentally ill with a weapon and killing people, an administrator or teacher can figure that out,” said Arizona’s Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu.

The move comes after the recent shooting massacre in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman shot and killed 26 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Gun-rights advocates say teachers can act more quickly than law enforcement in the critical first few minutes to protect children during a school shooting.

But some teachers strongly disagree with the idea.

“I think it’s ridiculous. I don’t think that teachers should be carrying guns. I don’t think violence is the answer. And the biggest thing I don’t think is I don’t think it’s going to solve the problem,” Kansas City Teachers Union President Andrea Flinders said.

So what about here in Washington state?

Could teachers here be allowed to carry guns in the classroom?

After all, the state has its own sad history of school shootings.

“This state has not been immune to school shootings. We had one in Moses Lake School District,Tacoma School District and an accidental shooting in the Bremerton School District,” state Schools Superintendent Randy Dorn said.

Still, Dorn says no to teachers carrying guns — not on his watch.

“That would not be something on my list to support,” Dorn said. “I think hiring people who are trained to have a gun, that would be the solution — police officers on campus, not arming our teachers.”

Only two states currently allow concealed weapons in schools. In Utah, its already legal, and in Ohio a school district has to give permission first.

SEATTLE — It’s not just a big increase in gun sales in this state — it’s enormous.

One Bellevue gun store is seeing  a 1,000% spike in gun sales since the Newtown, Conn., killings at the elementary school. It’s the AR-15 primarily used in that shooting that is now fueling sales.

Wade’s Eastside Gun had no shortage months ago; now the shelves are bare.

It’s somewhat of a feeding frenzy, said owner Wade Gaughran.

Semiautomatic weapons, specifically the AR-15s, which are the civilian versions of the military’s M-16 assault rifle, are on many people’s Christmas lists as the pressure mounts in Washington, D.C., to ban assault weapons.

“Our distributors are sold out, our manufacturers have kind of been caught with their pants down,” said Gaughran.

Nationwide, many Walmart branches are also sold out of these military-style rifles and a gun store in Charlotte, N.C., raked in more than $1 million in sales in just one day.

“Stocking up when I can and I am standing up for my Second Amendment rights,” said Wade’s Eastside Gun customer Paulson James.

If you ask the Second Amendment Foundation they are already under attack. Phil Watson said his group is dodging death threats and complaints from gun opponents using the Newtown tragedy as ammunition.

“We are open to a meaningful discussion about how to keep dangerous firearms away,” Watson said, adding that the focus should be on mental health and not gun control.

In the meantime, the anti-gun sentiment reaches a fever pitch.

“The Second Amendment doesn’t give us the right to bear every single weapon that we know of,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Feinstein is vowing to ban assault weapons and close the gun show loophole, with President Obama on her side.

“There is a danger to society but there is no preventing it whatsoever; there is always going to be crazy people out there. If you take guns, there is going to use something else to hurt people,” James said.

“There are so many millions of these guns floating around if some nutter wanted to get his hands on it he is going to get one of these,” said Gaughran.

Gaughran added that  once he is sold out of the AR-15, it could take months to restock because the manufacturers cannot make it fast enough and distributors are having to ration them out to all their different dealers.

WASHINGTON — In an angry and defiant news conference, National Rifle Association Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre on Friday forcefully rejected calls to clamp down on guns in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, arguing instead for a massive deployment of armed guards to every school.

In a statement released Friday afternoon, the Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Jose Banda and School Board President Kay Smith-Blum issued the following joint statement:

“The safety of our students and schools is of utmost importance to us. Our schools have a zero-tolerance policy on weapons on school grounds. We do not believe adding guns to our schools will accomplish the goal of keeping our students safer.

“We agree with Governor Gregoire and President Obama calling for action, including a ban on assault weapons. Further, as a community, we must have deeper conversations about the availability of weapons and the amount of violence our children are exposed to on a daily basis.

“There will be solutions moving forward from last week’s tragedy. We are forming a joint working group with the Seattle Police Department and our community to develop recommendations for improving school safety.”

LaPierre pledged that the NRA would spearhead such an endeavor, appointing former Arkansas Rep. Asa Hutchinson to lead an effort to develop a cutting-edge model school security plan and a program to train volunteers who would be dispatched to campuses around the country.

In the meantime, he called on Congress to immediately appropriate funding to pay for police officers in every school “to make sure that blanket safety is in place when our kids return to school in January.”

For the complete Los Angeles Times story, go here.