Church bells across the country rang 26 times Friday morning—one for each of the victims killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School —to mark the one-week anniversary of the Connecticut shootings.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy gathered in Newtown with other officials on the steps of the town hall as a bell chimed after each victim's name was read, Five more shooting victims, including three children, were to be buried later in the day.
Malloy requested participation in the bell-ringing earlier this week from all houses of worship and buildings equipped to carry out the symbolic gesture. He also requested Monday a statewide moment of silence at 9:30 a.m. ET, “exactly one week after the horror began to unfold.”
Governors from Louisiana to Hawaii to Illinois joined Malloy’s call for a moment to remember the 20 schoolchildren and six faculty members killed in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
The federal government participated as well, with President Obama observing the solemn 9:30 a.m. occasion at the White House. In the immediate aftermath of the Newtown tragedy, Obama vowed "meaningful action" and announced Vice President Joe Biden would lead a group to come up with "concrete proposals" to reduce gun violence by the end of January. Obama said in a web video Friday he was encouraged by a “We the People” petition posted on the White House website calling for more gun control. "We hear you," he told signers of the petition, which has amassed 200,000 supporters. The National Rifle Association, which has been largely silent since the tragedy, was to hold a press conference later in the day. The group promised "meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again."
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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, meanwhile, marked Friday's moment of silence at an elementary school in Washington D.C., where he was scheduled to speak at a school safety forum. His visit to Neval Thomas Elementary School is his first public appearance since the shooting last week.
A group from the technology world planned an Internet-based moment of silence. By Thursday evening, more than 150,000 people had signed a pledge to participate in a “five minute pause from all online activity” organized by Nick Grossman, an activist at Union Square Ventures, and the team at the activist site, Causes.com.
A companion website, webmomentofsilence.org, offered instructions on temporarily blacking out websites to “help bring focus to the events at Sandy Hook and the broader issue of gun violence in America.”
The website said that participation did not represent any political agenda and that organizers were hoping to remember the victims and “spark an ongoing productive conversation.”
Huffington Post, ESPN, Foursquare, TechCrunch, AOL, Gilt and Adobe were among the sites that participated in the online moment of silence, according to Ad Week.
The National Council of Churches told NBC News that many of its 100,000 congregations were planning to sound their bells Friday morning and those without bells were planning to honor the victims in other ways.
Remembering the Sandy Hook Victims: Portraits of the Fallen.
Susan Marie Smith, a rector at St. Albans Episcopal Church in Bexley, Ohio told NBC News that her church was planning a morning fast and 20 minutes of prayer “to share the burden of our brothers and sisters in Connecticut.”
Back in Newtown, funerals will continue for a fifth consecutive day. Three more children and two school staffers will be buried. They include: 6-year-old Olivia Engel; 6-year-old Dylan Hockley; 7-year-old Grace McDonnell; behavioral therapist Rachel D'Avino, 29; and school psychologist Mary Sherlach, 56.
On Thursday five children were laid to rest as well as a Sandy Hook teacher and Nancy Lanza, the mother of gunman Adam Lanza who fatally shot her before ambushing Sandy Hook Elementary School and taking his own life.