Bells across the country will ring 26 times Friday morning—one for each of the victims killed in last week’s Newtown shooting—to mark the one-week anniversary of the elementary school attack.
On Monday, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy requested participation from all houses of worship and buildings equipped to carry out the symbolic gesture. He also requested a statewide moment of silence at 9:30 a.m., “exactly one week after the horror began to unfold.”
Governors from Louisiana to Hawaii to Illinois promptly joined Malloy’s call for a moment to remember the twenty schoolchildren and six faculty members killed in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, as did a group from the technology world, who are planning an Internet-based moment of silence.
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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 participating 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 is planning a morning fast and 20 minutes of prayer “to share the burden of our brothers and sisters in Connecticut.”
The federal government is participating as well. President Obama will observe the solemn 9:30 a.m. occasion at the White House, while Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will mark the moment of silence at an elementary school in Washington D.C., where he is scheduled to speak at a school safety forum. His visit to Neval Thomas Elementary School will be his first public appearance since the shooting last week.
Meanwhile, in Newtown funerals will continue for a fifth consecutive day.
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.