Erik S. Lesser / EPA

Ron Moon, co-owner of CJI Guns in Tucker, Ga., holds a pair of 100-bullet-capacity magazines for an AR15 assault style semi-automatic rifle on Wednesday.

Anticipating staunch resistance from gun-rights groups to any effort to ban assault-style rifles, some pro-gun control lawmakers are instead trying to leverage the national outrage over the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., to enact federal legislation outlawing high-capacity ammunition clips.

House Democrats, emboldened by President Barack Obama's call Wednesday for quick, "concrete” proposals to curb gun violence, are pushing House Republicans to quickly consider a ban on high-capacity clips.

The move follows the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six adults on Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary school. The gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza carried three guns, primarily using a Bushmaster XM-15 — an AR-15/M4-type rifle -- which police said was fed by 30-round magazines. He also was armed with a Glock 10mm handgun and Sig Sauer 9mm handgun. Although authorities didn't reveal the models of those weapons, both of those handguns allow high-capacity clips -- including 15-round magazines for one model of 10mm handgun that's sold by Glock.  

The bill’s list of co-sponsors this week grew from 113 to 135, according to a spokesman for Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., the measure’s author. In 1993, a man armed with a gun and several 15-round magazines shot and killed McCarthy’s husband, Dennis, aboard a Long Island, N.Y., commuter train. Five others also died and 25 were wounded. 

“We've been here before,” McCarty said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “All too often, we see these mass killings and yet all our lives go on. Everybody is asking: Is this time different? It is ... This time is different because there is so much anger.”

“We can get the job done,” added House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., one of the bill’s co-sponsors. In an interview Tuesday with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Pelosi predicted: “Right away we could pass ... the ban on the assault magazine.”

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In the other house of Congress, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., is simultaneously pushing for a rapid vote on his almost identical proposal to outlaw the possession, import or sale of any ammunition clip that hold more than 10 rounds, saying: “These high-capacity magazines, which were used in Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech and so many other tragedies, were designed for one purpose only — to shoot and kill quickly.”

From 1994 to 2004, high-capacity ammunition magazines were illegal as part of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, but that provision lapsed when the legislation expired. Congressional Democrats have made several attempts to similar legislation barring possession of rapid-fire assault-style weapons since then, but those efforts have failed.

Legislators also have pushed legislation banning specific types of bullets – with one notable success: In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that outlawed armor-piercing "cop-killer" bullets. 

But other recent ammunition-cutting proposals have failed to gain traction in Congress. Last summer, a bill filed Lautenberg and McCarthy sought to significantly curb the ability of Americans to buy unlimited amounts of ammunition via the Internet. That bill never made it beyond the Senate Judiciary Committee, a spokeswoman for Lautenberg said this week.   

So in a country where the right to bear arms is held sacred, firearm foes are refining their pitch to focus on the delivery mechanism. One of their main talking points is asking why such high-capacity clips are necessary.

“I've been a hunter all my life, and there's no reason to have a magazine that holds 30 shells,” said Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif. “Call it what it is: an assault magazine. And we don't have any reason to assault anyone in our communities, in our neighborhoods. ... Why do you need 30 shells in a magazine?"

“Who needs these? The answer is sports shooters,” responds Mark Walters, co-author of "Lessons from Armed America" and host of a syndicated radio show “Armed American Radio." “For example, if you were target shooting or practicing for an upcoming (shooting competition), it’s nice not to have to change magazines on a regular continual basis."

What’s more, many ranchers use firearms like AR15s — manufactured to carry 30-round magazines — to protect their herds from coyotes and clear their land of prairie dogs, added George Hill, an employee at Basin Sports in Vernal, Utah.

The talk of banning “assault magazines” emanating from Washington appears to be driving sales of the high-capacity clips, according to Walters and Hill.

 “I came in at 8 this morning and I have been non-stop on selling AR15s and ammo. Nonstop,” Hill said Wednesday afternoon. “Those (30-round clips) have been going out, and I’ve been selling those two, three, 10 at a time. Everybody’s worried about the politics behind it and that’s generating a lot of these sales. They’re worried about it being banned.

“I would be real happy to only sell Benelli goose-hunting guns and Browning deer rifles. And that’s normally what we sell this time of year. But the politics has super-heated the tactical market. Normally, I sell somebody 50 rounds, maybe 100 pounds. Instead, I’m selling them 500 or 1,000 rounds.”

While Walters and Hill each oppose the proposed ban on high-capacity clips in principle, they argued as well that such a crackdown won’t slow gun violence in this country.

“This is all symbolic legislation that will do nothing. Absolutely nothing. If I could say something different, I would admit that,” Walters said. “But the facts don’t bear that out. It’s just feel-good legislation being backed into a horrible event.”

They note that gun ownership has increased over the past decade, with the number of instant criminal background checks conducted by retailers required by federal law rising each year. In November alone, more than 2 million such point-of-sale investigations were performed nationally on people seeking to purchase firearms — the most in any single month since federal officials launched the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) in 1998, according to the FBI. By comparison, gun retailers and federal authorities completed 842,932 background checks in November 2003.

“There are millions of rounds of ammunition already in the public’s hands — high-capacity or standard-capacity magazines already in the public's hands,” Walters said. “If they pass this ban, in the days prior to the date (it goes into effect), stores will sell 10 years’ worth of these capacity magazines.

“But beyond that, it’s irrelevant. A seasoned, experienced firearms enthusiast, including myself, can change a magazine out, including a tactical reload, in under a second,” Walters said.

Moreover, such ammunition doesn’t degrade over time, he added.

“It’s a plastic magazine with a spring. Magpul (based in Erie, Colo.) makes the most popular 30-round magazines, PMAGs, which are selling for $13.99,” Walters said. “I have five of them being reserved at my store because they’re selling like crazy. I know I could keep them in my safe forever. I can open it in 20 years, take it out of the plastic bag, and if I want to use it, I can use it.”

Any federal ammo ban — or mandated purchase limits on certain clips or bullets — would simply create an “underground market,” Hill said. Today, scores of gun enthusiasts — including many hunters — make their own bullets as a hobby. They’re called “reloaders.”

“People have been making ammunition themselves since the 1880s. That’s something anybody is capable of doing with a little bit of know-how,” Hill said. "Those kinds of bans are like throwing a steak on the grill for like 10 seconds and calling it cooked. It just looks like it’s cooked but it’s not.

“You can reload. Or, you can order online and get stuff from outside the U.S. It’s too late for any of that,” Hill said. “And it never works.”

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AP file

Fox News commentator Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, was accused of saying God had abandoned the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School. But his comments were more nuanced than that.

What is to blame for the Connecticut school attack?

In the wake of catastrophe, people want explanations, and as news spread of the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, some religious conservatives were ready with an answer: the exclusion of God from public schools and the embrace of liberal social policies.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who is ordained as a minister in the Southern Baptist Church, said Friday on Fox News that "we've systematically removed God from our schools."

"Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" he asked.

Huckabee's comments drew criticism from progressive religious leaders, who accused him of suggesting that God wasn't there with the 26 victims at Sandy Hook.

Martin E. Marty, the prominent religious scholar, wrote Monday for the Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago (which is named for him) that Huckabee "wins, hands down, the prize for his absurdist judgment that 'Newtown' should have been no surprise."

Full coverage: Tragedy at Sandy Hook

Steve McSwain, a former Baptist minister who is now a nationally known interfaith activist, addressed Huckabee directly, writing: 

"With such remarks, you not only show little regard for those broken by this tragedy, but you make God into some kind a cosmic psychopath — vengeful, sickeningly repulsive, one who takes out his madness on innocent little children.

"Your reasoning is repulsive: Because we have removed your god from our schools, this is how your god gets even?" he wrote.

The intensity of the rhetoric underscores how quickly discussions of the religious underpinnings of tragedy can turn heated. Little noticed among Huckabee's critics is that he didn't say God turned his back on Newtown; he expressly said God was there in the good works people were doing.

"God wasn't armed. He didn't go to the school," Huckabee continued. "But God will be there in the form of a lot of people with hugs and therapy and a whole lot of ways in which he will be involved in the aftermath."

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Other social conservatives echoed Huckabee's thoughts on the root cause of Friday's attack.

James Dobson, the evangelical founder of the powerful organization Focus on the Family, said on his radio show, "Family Talk," that because "we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty, I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on."

Dobson blamed two issues in particular: abortion and gay marriage.

"I mean, millions of people have decided that God doesn't exist or he's irrelevant to me, and we have killed 54 million babies, and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too."

Joseph Farah, editor of the conservative news site WND (formerly World Net Daily), wrote Sunday that the U.S. should expect "more Sandy Hooks, not fewer," because of America's "secularism" and restrictions on guns.

Grounding his opposition to gun control in religious terms, Farah likened arguments for gun control to philosophies underpinning "Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union (and) Mao's China," declaring:

"We are reaping the seeds of the whirlwind we ourselves planted. ... It's not that there are too many guns in our hands. It's that there is not enough repentance in our hearts."

For teachers, classroom security concerns come to the fore

The temptation to leap to such judgments is understandable, the Rev. Jenny Warner of First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Ore., said in her sermon Sunday. But she argued that that's the coward's way out.

Slideshow:

David Friedman / NBC News

A nation mourns after the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history at Sandy Hook Elementary, which left 20 children and six staff members dead.

Launch slideshow

"How many people are saying, 'Oh, we need more gun control'? How many people are saying, 'If only God was more in our schools'? How many people are blaming it on this politician or that politician?" Warner asked her congregation.

"Another article I read was about how Mike Huckabee was blaming this on our politics, and so from both sides you've got the questions and the blame game happening."

Those are "all ways that make it easier ... to stay a little bit more removed from it, to not have to enter it in such a profound and intimate way," she said. But that's what makes it all the more important for religious people to confront tragedy, not seek to explain it.

Sure, "we need doctors," she said. "We need symposiums on world poverty. We need people to go in and address issues and to help provide a response. ...

"But we need healing, and healing comes with relationships. Healing comes by reaching out to someone and listening. Healing comes by calling and following up.

Healing comes when those four friends grab their friend and say, 'We're in this with you,'" she said, an allusion to Mark 2:1-12, in which four men lower their paralyzed friend through the roof of a crowded building where Jesus is preaching so he can be healed.

Real healing, Warner said, "steps into the pain and is with someone in it."

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A serial tragedy — like Friday's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 children dead — is like “a big rock thrown in a pond,” grief experts say, casting emotional ringlets that drench those closest to the bloodshed in life-changing despair and bathe entire communities and even distant observers in sorrow.

"What happens after that rock lands in the pond? The waves circulate out from ground zero. There are the victims. And these (at Sandy Hook Elementary School) are babies, so unbelievably sad,” said Dr. Jeff Dolgan, chief psychologist at Children's Hospital in Denver. “Some people are not even directly touched by the trauma but are in fact traumatized — think about the other kids at the school, the administrators at the school, the first responders, the caregivers. Then the waves radiate out from the school into the community."

Those ripples may initially unite a town in candlelight and song then splinter it into a torrent of blame and lawsuits, as happened after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999 that killed 12 students and one teacher and injured 24 others.

"At Columbine, the impact was very widely felt. I talked to the people who were dealing with the fatalities at the hospitals. They had caregiver trauma. They did everything they could with the influx of severely injured but felt inadequate to the task,” he added.

After the Columbine massacre, Dolgan and his colleagues aligned with mental health experts in Jefferson County, Colo., launching a hotline where local parents could call for advice on soothing their own kids' anxieties. On Friday, Dolgan urged the parents in Newtown to similarly band together.

“This is a neighborhood elementary school and the parents there hopefully are tight-knit. Once you have the care done, I hope the parents are supportive of one another and work with one another,” Dolgan said. “I hope parents team up and, in time, do get-togethers.”

Dolgan witnessed firsthand how some Columbine families looked initially to condemn and penalize neighboring families and local law enforcement officers for the deaths in their school. The families of more than 30 Columbine victims sued the parents of the two killers, also Columbine students, eventually settling for $2.53 million. The families of 17 Columbine victims also sued the Jefferson County sheriff’s department; one of those victims settled in 2004 for $117,500.

Many of the Columbine families, Dolgan agreed, were likely seeking outlets to vent their anger at the tragic event, and at the murders.

“But who are you going to blame? The first responders? No. (Columbine principal Frank) DeAngelis? No. The school security? No,” Dolgan said. “In time, there was more healing and the parents came together. But initially, no, there were some fractious qualities.”

While heartache and fury may engulf a town after a mass killing, such serial traumas psychologically damage those closest to the suffering on a far deeper level than they do people who were merely in the vicinity, who were, perhaps, close enough to hear the gunfire but not see the deaths, science has found. 

Among 1,000 students who were on campus at Dawson College in Montreal in 2006 when a man shot and wounded 19 people, killing one, about one-third were found to be dealing with some form of mental illness within 18 months of that tragedy, according to a paper published in 2009. 

“The most common form was clinical depression – which affected 12 percent or 1 in 8. That is about three times higher than would be expected in a normal population,” said Dr. Warren Steiner, head of the department of psychiatry at McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, and one of the paper's authors.

“The next highest was substance abuse — drug or alcohol — which affected about 10 percent, people who were self-treating their own anxieties. That’s about three times higher than you would see in the normal population,” Steiner said.

The precise proximity of the survivors to the violence that day directly affected their mental health later, the research team learned. They divided the 1,000 students into four groups based on their “level of exposure.” Those who had witnessed the shootings received the “highest” exposure score, followed by those who only heard gunfire, followed by those who locked themselves into classrooms without knowing if they were next, followed by those who were on campus but unaware of the attacks.

Slideshow: Connecticut school massacre

Michelle Mcloughlin / Reuters

The second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history sent crying children spilling into the school parking lot as frightened parents waited for word on their loved ones.

Launch slideshow

“There was a direct correlation between the level of exposure to the shootings and the development of mental illness. It’s common sense, but it had never been proven before,” Steiner said.

For those who viewed the killings, or who had held a wounded classmate in their arms, post-traumatic stress disorder was the most commonly diagnosed illness, followed by depression and then alcohol dependency. 

But while the mass traumas at Columbine and Dawson College soaked each community in immediate anguish -- and, eventually, imbued those closest to the gunfire with psychological turmoil -- they continue to resonate in the Denver area and in Montreal, the psychologists said.

Memories of each are rekindled after the news of other serial shootings, including the 32 people who were shot and killed at Virginia Tech in 2007, the 13 people who were shot and killed at Fort Hood in 2009, and the 70 moviegoers who were shot — 12 fatally — in Aurora, Colo. on July 20.

“You hear about another one, and there’s the reflex of anxiety,” Steiner said. “I guarantee everyone who was at Dawson will hear the news this evening and they will have flashbacks and disturbing memories, PTSD-like symptoms from what happened to them.

“It goes on for a generation, no doubt about that,” Steiner said.

Dolgan agreed that the shelf-life of a local mass tragedy sticks with a community for several decades, and isn't simply shaken by the passing of time.

“No, no,” Dolgan said. “This is very long-lived.”

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Andrew Gombert / Pool / EPA

Mourners gather inside the St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, Conn., on Friday night at a vigil service for victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Click this image for more pictures.

Updated at 11:55 p.m. ET: Residents from around the region streamed Friday into St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, Conn., to mourn the 20 children and six adults who were killed when a gunman opened fire in an elementary school.

A memorial Mass got under way at 7 p.m. ET at the church, whose pastor, Msgr. Robert Weiss, spent much of the day at a firehouse that had been turned into a gathering place for families affected by the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The church was packed, and hundreds of people who couldn't get in stood silently outside, where 26 candles were set up by a tree wth a cross. Some held hands, praying as a group. Others reverently touched a statue of Saint Rose, the first person native to the Americas to be canonized by the Catholic Church, before crossing themselves.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy was among the speakers at the service inside the St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic church, The Associated Press reported.

"Many of us today and in the coming days will rely on what we have been taught and what we believe, that there is faith for a reason," Malloy said.

The service was just one of many prayer services and vigils planned across Connecticut through the weekend, NBC Connecticut reported. A statewide moment of silence was observed at 9 p.m. ET.

Elementary school massacre: 27 killed, including 20 kids, at Connecticut school

After the vigil at St. Rose, Weiss told reporters gathered outside that six or seven kids who had attended the church were among the 20 children who died.

“I think the families are very broken,” he said. “I’m sure that they’re still wondering and questioning. I think some of them are still hoping that this really didn’t happen. The rough days are just ahead of them.”  

John Makely / NBC News

People file in to St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, Conn., to pay their respects to the victims of the shooting Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Just a short drive away, parishioners at Trinity Episcopal Church shed tears during a solemn prayer service. The quiet crying grew louder when the Rev. Kathleen Adams-Shepherd announced that two children, members of the congregation, were among those killed.

Adams-Shepherd had spent much of the day at the fire station with the families of some of the presumed victims. 

"I don't think we'll ever be the same," she said.

"There are no words,” the Rt. Rev. James Curry said in the prayer service. “There is nothing that we can say but instead we cry out. We cry out in shared grief and pain for the loss of so many children, so many adults .... We do not understand, and we cannot imagine why someone would murder. We cannot comprehend."

Alex Moe, John Schoen and Miranda Leitsinger of NBC News contributed to this report from Newtown, Conn.

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