NEWTOWN, Connecticut: Heart-rending funerals were held on Monday for two six-year-old boys, as America began to say farewell to the 20 children slain in a school shooting that has sparked calls for new gun laws.

The first burials, held under raw, wet skies, were of a pair of boys who were among those shot in Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut.

On Tuesday, the first of the girls, also aged six, was to be laid to rest.

In all, on Friday, the gunman slaughtered 20 children aged between six and seven, six adults working at the school and his own mother, before turning one of his arsenals of high-powered firearms on himself.

“You see little coffins and your heart has to ache,” said State Gov. Dannel Malloy.

The family of six-year-old Jack Pinto gathered at a funeral home in a century-old building in the center of the Connecticut town. Some 20 children of different ages came to bid him farewell.

Jack Wellman, an eighth-grader who helped coach Jack in wrestling, said that the kid’s teammates placed their sports medals in his coffin.

“He was an excellent kid,” Wellman said afterward.

Another well-wisher was overwhelmed. “I just cannot describe it, it was sad,” she said. “Our hearts are heavy.”

All schools in this prosperous and picturesque town northeast of New York City were shut until at least on Tuesday and the blood-spattered elementary school itself was to remain a closed crime scene indefinitely, authorities said.

“Healing is still going on,” Newtown p/Lieutenant George Sinko said.

For Newtown, a quiet suburban community where the 20-year-old killer lived with his well-off
mother, the start of funerals did nothing to heal wounds.

But the crime, in which the shooter carried a high-powered, military style rifle and two handguns, may have spurred change in the political landscape regarding rules on weapons ownership.

The Senate held a moment’s silence in Washington, as several Democratic lawmakers who had previously opposed gun control changed their stance. Voters, meanwhile, rushed to sign an online petition on the White House website calling for tougher gun laws—158,000 signed in three days, the fastest ever burst of support in the site’s history.

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California promised to introduce a bill to ban assault weapons on the first day of the next Congress meeting in January 3.

And on Monday, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut called for a broad commission that would bring opponents on the issue together to discuss curbing gun deaths.

Each year, over 31,000 Americans die from gunshots, most of them self-inflicted, but over 11,000 are homicides—five times as many as the death toll for US troops during an entire decade of conflict in Afghanistan.

But with gun ownership protected by the US constitution and firearms deeply ingrained in American culture, attempts to restrict access have long been seen as a vote-losing proposition.

The full picture of the horror and heroism in the school, where the shooter, Adam Lanza, sprayed bullets into two rooms, is starting to emerge.

Newtown was the second deadliest school shooting in US history after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, in which South Korean student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before taking his own life.

Nine-year-old Nicholas Sabillon, interviewed with his parents at his side, told Agence France-Presse how Lanza knocked on the door of his class’s hiding place—but never entered. The children were taken to safety but the frightening memory remains.

Sabillon recounted how the Connecticut gunman who killed his schoolmates pounded on the locked door of the room where he was hiding.

When the first shots rang out at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, music teacher Maryrose Kristopik ushered Nicholas’s class into a large closet and quickly locked the door. “We held onto the instruments to not make any noise,” said Nicholas, who clutched a gong.

“We were all really scared and then we prayed . . . Miss Kristopik gave us all lollipops. We thought it would be our last snack. Then we heard this glass shatter and we were all scared, and we heard knocking on the class door from the outside. Luckily, we were all quiet, and the guy was talking ‘Let me in, let me in!’ and we never opened the door.”

For hours, she listened, incredulous, to news reports of an ever-increasing death toll.

Lanza slaughtered his own mother, six adults working at the school and 20 young children aged just six or seven before turning a gun on himself. He was armed with a military-style rifle and two handguns.

Nicholas did not mention seeing any bodies or blood, but the experience remained harrowing nonetheless.

“When you go to bed, it feels scary and you keep having this dream in your head about it,” he said. “Because if you lived it, it’s always stuck in your head.”