by Ted Barrett and Tom Cohen

CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) — In a major defeat for supporters of tougher gun laws, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday defeated a compromise proposal to expand background checks on firearms sales.

The bipartisan plan brokered by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, and Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania, was backed by President Barack Obama in his push for a package of gun laws in the aftermath of the Newtown school massacre.

However, fierce opposition by the powerful National Rifle Association led a backlash by conservative Republicans and a few Democrats from pro-gun states that doomed the amendment to the broader package of legislation.

Due to procedural steps by Republican opponents, the amendment required 60 votes to pass in the 100-member chamber, meaning Democrats and their Independent allies who hold 55 seats needed support from some GOP senators to push them through.

The final vote was 54 in favor to 46 opposed with two Republicans joining most Democrats in supporting the compromise.

The overall gun legislation includes tougher laws on gun trafficking and straw purchases, and steps to devise ways to improve safety in schools.

It would be the most significant gun legislation before Congress in almost two decades, and comes four months after the December shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 first-graders and six educators.

Obama pushed hard for Congress to include expanded background checks in any gun package and the White House campaigned in support of the Manchin-Toomey compromise.

However, the NRA promised political retribution against supporters of tougher gun laws.

“You may not win today … but I will say that you did the right thing,” veteran GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona said in praising Manchin and Toomey tor political courage in proposing their compromise. McCain was one of three Republicans who supported the compromise.

Manchin earlier sounded resigned to defeat, telling his colleagues that regardless of how the chamber votes, the issue of background checks “is not going to go away.”

The NRA has said an expanded background check system would be the first step toward a national gun registry and therefore a violation of the constitutional right to bear arms.

Manchin and other supporters rejected that claim, noting the compromise amendment prohibited a national gun registry and criminalizes misusing background check data for that purpose.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid warned Republicans that the strong majority of Americans who support expanded background checks won’t forget votes against the Manchin-Toomey compromise.

“The American people … have a long, long memory,” he said.

Meanwhile, conservative Republicans proposed an alternative package of gun laws that reflected the NRA position.

The GOP plan, introduced Wednesday after weeks of hearings and debate on Democratic proposals, lacked any expansion of background checks but called for more funding to better enforce the existing system.

A sponsor of the Republican alternative, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said it would target the gun violence problem in a way that the Democratic proposal before the Senate would not.

In response, Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vermont, called the GOP’s last-minute proposal a “weak and counterproductive alternative.”

Other proposed amendments to the gun package sent to the Senate by Leahy’s committee include a ban on semi-automatic firearms modeled after military assault weapons sponsored by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, and a plan by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to make state concealed weapons permits acceptable throughout the country.

The Senate debate was expected to last several days and any legislation passed would then go to the Republican-led House. So far, House Speaker John Boehner has stopped short of promising a vote on whatever the Senate sends over.

Obama and others have been highlighting daily gun violence in America in their appeal to lawmakers for stricter limits.

Many in Washington have coalesced around expanding background checks conducted on gun sales. However, settling on the exact mechanism of such a step has been difficult in a sharply divided political climate, with the NRA leading a strong lobbying effort against proposed changes.

Few amendments may pass

The Manchin-Toomey proposal would have extend background checks to private transactions at gun shows and all Internet sales.

Reid, D-Nevada, said last month that Feinstein’s revised ban on some semiautomatic weapons, which was approved by the Judiciary Committee with no Republican support, had no chance of passing.

He agreed to allow Feinstein to propose it as an amendment instead of including it in the legislative package from the judiciary panel.

Polls support background checks

Polls show that a strong majority of Americans support some type of initiative to stem gun violence. In a CNN/ORC International poll released last week, 86% of Americans say they support expanded background checks.

However, a majority of Americans also fear that increased background checks would lead to a federal registry of gun owners that could allow the government to take away legally owned weapons.

White House spokesman Jay Carney called any claim that the Manchin-Toomey plan would lead to a federal gun registry and confiscation of firearms “absurd and false and wrong.”

“The legislation itself prohibits that,” he said, adding “what should be clear to those senators who are considering this, because it’s clear to the American people, is that this is common sense.”

CNN’s Ed Payne contributed to this report.

(CNN) — Police released new documents related to the shootings last year at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, but a motive for the attack remained elusive.

Included in the new information is the report that a gun safe was found in the bedroom of 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who took guns belonging to his mother, Nancy, and shot her in her forehead in her bed. Then he went to the school in Newtown, where he gunned down 20 children and six staff members before killing himself.

Investigators found more than 1,400 rounds of ammunition in the house, and a holiday card with a check “made out to Adam Lanza for the purchase of a C183 (firearm), authored by Nancy Lanza,” according to a search warrant.

Relatives of the victims were briefed Wednesday about the documents, which were released Thursday morning.

Some of the documents, released by state prosecutors, have been redacted at the prosecutors’ request, said Paul Vance, a spokesman for the Connecticut State Police.

State police are continuing their investigation, which is not expected to be completed until June, he said.

The killings have led Connecticut legislators to re-examine the state’s gun laws, which are among the nation’s strictest, and have reopened a national debate on gun control.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, has announced plans to introduce legislation requiring background checks to purchase ammunition. He has pressured members of his state legislature to take action to bolster his efforts on a national level.

CNN’s Susan Candiotti and Samira Jafari contributed to this report.

(CNN) — The shooting spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School may have been motivated by a desire by Adam Lanza to outdo Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian man who killed 77 people in July 2011, law enforcement sources told CBS Evening News.

The unnamed sources said Lanza saw himself as being in direct competition with Breivik, who killed eight with a bombing in downtown Oslo before he moved to a nearby island where he hunted down and fatally shot 69 people.

According to the sources, the 20-year-old Lanza wanted to top Breivik’s death toll and went to the Connecticut school on December 14 because it was the “easiest target” and had the “largest cluster of people.”

Video games to blame?

The same officials also linked Lanza’s actions to violent video games.

The officials, who have been briefed on the Newtown, Connecticut, investigation, told CBS that evidence shows Lanza was likely acting out the fantasies of a video game in killing 20 children and six adults at the school.

Lanza’s mother, Nancy, also was found shot dead at her Newtown home. Police believe Lanza killed his mother first before beginning his school rampage.

He took his own life with a handgun as authorities closed in.

Police dismiss report

A spokesman for the Connecticut State Police dismissed the CBS report, calling it speculation.

“It’s inaccurate … I talked with CBS and told them that,” Lt. Paul Vance told CNN. “We are dealing with a deceased shooter and trying to rebuild history.”

Vance, however, did not dismiss the notion that investigators may have looked at the Norway shooting.

“We’ll look at everything,” Vance said. “One thing leads to another.”

Authorities have been largely tight-lipped about their investigation.

Hundreds of state troopers, detectives and other law enforcement personnel are analyzing every round of ammunition fired, examining the gunman’s medical history and computer use, and talking to witnesses, Vance said previously.

A final report on the Newtown shooting is expected this summer.

The Norway attacks

July 22, 2011, will live long in the memory of all Norwegians after the carnage that unfolded that day.

After detonating a bomb outside the prime minister’s office in Oslo, killing eight people, Breivik took a ferry to Utoya Island and embarked on a shooting spree that took the lives of another 69 people attending a youth camp.

Authorities said Breivik roamed the island shooting at campers, before members of an elite Norwegian police unit took him into custody.

In August 2012, Breivik, who boasted of being an ultranationalist who killed his victims to fight multiculturalism in Norway, was judged to be sane at the time of the attack.

He was convicted of voluntary homicide and committing acts of terror and sentenced to 21 years in prison.

CNN’s Susan Candiotti contributed to this report.

By Susan Candiotti and Thom Patterson

CNN

(CNN) — His parents remember Dylan Hockley as such a happy child.

He was 6 and full of joy, his mother, Nicole Hockley, says.

She said he was always smiling and described his laugh as infectious. When his dad would return to their Newtown, Connecticut, home each day, Dylan would run to his father, Ian, saying,”Daddy!”

It’s been exactly a month since Dylan and his teacher, Anne Marie Murphy, and 24 other students and adults were killed by a lone gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As would be expected, coping has been hard.

“It’s a strange moment when you wake up in the morning and for that brief second everything is as it was,” she says. “And then you realize that nothing is ever as it was — and never will be again.”

On Monday, after putting themselves “in a little cocoon,” as she put it, Hockley decided it was time to tell the world about Dylan.

“He was autistic,” she says, “but incredibly empathetic.”

“He just wanted to have fun.”

Most of all, Dylan loved to bounce on a trampoline in the family’s backyard, remembers his father.

“I’d say, ‘Go out on the trampoline!’ Ian Hockley says. “And he would always say, ‘are you coming, Daddy?’”

Together, they would vault up on the trampoline and bounce, sometimes joined by Dylan’s brother, Jake, who is two years older.

“If I didn’t go, Dylan wouldn’t go,” Ian Hockley remembers. “He just wanted to have so much fun with me.”

Just down the street lived Adam Lanza, 20. Authorities said Lanza opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary before taking his own life. They said he killed his mother, Nancy, before the school shooting.

Asked whether they knew the Lanzas, Nicole Hockley stiffened and said no.

But they say the pain has made it impossible to even drive past the Lanza home. So they are moving elsewhere in the community.

“You can’t drive up your driveway every day and see the house of a person who took your son’s life and who brought so much pain to so many people,” Nicole said. “We are leaving that house. We will stay in Newtown, but that’s just one thing too much. I can’t do that every day.”

And they have trouble answering Jake’s questions, such as why? And will this happen again?

Nicole says these are not things an 8-year-old should have to worry about.

But Ian says it’s Jake’s difficult questions that give them the will to get involved — to try to make something positive come from the tragedy.

“We’re just focusing on getting up each day,” Nicole said.

As she puts it, the family is “trying to find a way to make sense of this by taking some action and getting involved.”

They’ve started a fund in Dylan’s name to raise money to support programs and educational aids for other children with autism and other special needs.

They haven’t learned all the details of the massacre that happened on December 14. Until now, they haven’t felt much like watching TV or interacting with the outside world.

But one detail has given the Hockleys comfort.

A few days after the tragedy, the Hockley’s ran into Mike Murphy. His wife, Anne Marie Murphy, taught their son at Sandy Hook.

He revealed to her that — in the terrible aftermath of the attack — first responders found Dylan and his teacher together.

“He said that Anne Marie Murphy had been found with her arms wrapped around Dylan … that is what we had hoped for — in a very strange sort of way to hope for something.”

“She loved him and he loved her and she would’ve looked after him no matter what,” she says, fighting back tears. “To know that he was with her, and that he wasn’t alone, that gives you a huge peace of mind … to know that he was loved even in those last moments.”