US town shattered by school shooting that killed 26

Connecticut town were reeling in horror Saturday from the massacre The residents of an idyllic Connecticut town were reeling in horror Saturday from the massacre of 20 small children and six adults at a school, in one of the worst mass shootings in US history. The heavily armed young gunman shot dead 18 children inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, said Connecticut State Police spokesman Lieutenant Paul Vance.
Two more died of their wounds in hospital, Vance said.
Six adults at the school were also killed, he added, before the gunman, clad in black body armour according to media reports, was shot - either by his own hand or by police.
US media said the school principal was among those killed.
Authorities offered little clue as to the motive for the shootings in Newtown, a wooded and picturesque small town north-east of New York City.
Hours after the shooting, hundreds of people gathered for a vigil, the crowd filling the church to capacity and spilling outside its doors.
Some lit candles while others joined hands to sing Christmas songs.
"This is a kind of community, when things like that happen, they really pull together," the priest, Robert Weiss, said during the Mass.
David Connors, whose triplets were at the school during the shooting but were unharmed, said he was still horrified.
"It's hard. I've never imagined a thing like that could happen here."
"Evil visited this community today," State Governor Dan Malloy said earlier.
President Barack Obama, wiping away tears and struggling to maintain his composure, said he was aghast over the tragedy.
Vance said just one person suffered an injury and survived, indicating that the gunman was unusually accurate or methodical in his fire.
The majority of killings, which began at around 09:30 am, "took place in one section of the school, in two rooms," Vance added. The children were aged between five and ten, officials said.
US media reported that the killer was Adam Lanza, 20, and that police had earlier confused him with his brother, 24-year-old Ryan Lanza, whose identity card he had been carrying with him when he went into the school.
The surviving brother was in custody and being questioned, according to US television reports.
Many news outlets said the extra victim found in a home in Newtown - the 28th body in the day's bloodshed was the shooter's mother, who was a teacher at Sandy Hook and whom he had killed before driving to the school.
Police said they expected to be able to make public the identities of the victims later on Saturday.
Vance described a "massive investigation" and said that law enforcement agents working at the scene were having a hard time coping. "Between our personal experiences, we've never seen anything like this. It was heart wrenching for us," he said.
Obama went on national television to express his "overwhelming grief." He ordered flags to be lowered at half mast.
And there were similar statements of grief and shock around the world.
The head of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso spoke of his "deep shock and horror," Britain's Queen Elizabeth II sent a message to Obama in which she said she was "deeply shocked and saddened."
Of all US campus shootings, the toll was second only to the 32 murders in the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech.
The latest number far exceeded the 15 killed in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which triggered a fierce but inconclusive debate about the United States' relaxed gun control laws.
However, the White House on Friday scotched any suggestion that the politically explosive subject would be quickly reopened.
Witnesses described an intense fusillade fired at the elementary school, possibly numbering some 100 rounds, and seeing a corridor splattered with blood.
"I was going back to my classroom and I heard like a person kicking on the door and I turned around I smelled smoke," an eight-year-old boy told NBC.
"Then bullets whizzed by and then a teacher pulled me into her room," he said, describing "total panic."
Police swarmed into the leafy neighbourhood after the shooting, while other area schools were put under lock-down.
"We locked all the doors in our school and remained in our classrooms until it was safe," said Bobby Haskins, a 14-year-old student at a nearby school.
He said he'd heard accounts of the horror from friends at the elementary school.
"The little brother of my friend was able to make it out by the back door and run to the centre where he was picked up by a man and carried to the fire house," Haskins recounted.
Another young student told WCBS television he could hear the gunshots but wasn't sure what they were.
"I was in the gym at the time, we heard lots of bangs, and we thought that it was the custodian knocking stuff down. We heard screaming," he said.
"Then the police came in and said, is he in here? And then ran out. Then somebody yelled "get to a safe place," so we went to the closet in the gym and we sat there for a little while," he said, as stunned parents arrived.
"Then the police like were knocking on the door, and they're like, we're evacuating people, we're evacuating people. We ran out."
The police response was credited with ensuring the speedy evacuation of the rest of the school, once the gunman unleashed his attack.
Deadly shootings are frequent occurrences in US public places, often ending only when the gunman is shot or kills himself.
On Tuesday, a man with a semi-automatic rifle raked an Oregon shopping mall, killing two people, then taking his own life.
In the most notorious recent incident until now, a 24-year-old, James Holmes, allegedly killed 12 people and wounded 58 others when he opened fire at a midnight screening of the latest Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, in July.
However, despite the tragedies, support for tougher gun ownership laws is mixed, with many Americans opposing restrictions on what they consider to be a constitutional right to keep powerful firearms at home.