Barack Obama to join families of Sandy Hook shooting victims at vigil in Newtown

President Barack Obama is scheduled to travel to Newtown, Connecticut tonight to meet the families of victims killed in Friday’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the White House announced.

Barack Obama is expected to meet with families and first responders at a 7:00 p.m. interfaith vigil.

According to the Hartford Courant, Barack Obama will not make any public appearances during his visit.

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton tweeted helicopters could be over nearby Danbury, Connecticut, today were an advance team setting up for his visit.

Barack Obama will also appear on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, and tweeted out links to a website named Demand a Plan, which launched after the July shooting in Colorado and asks voters to pressure Congress and the White House into changing the law.

In his weekly radio and Internet address earlier on Saturday, Barack Obama said it was time to “take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this”.

Barack Obama stopped short of calling for tighter gun-control laws.

In the wake of the deadly shooting the pressure’s on the president, who promised during a debate two months ago that he would “keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill”.

Families in the small community of Newtown, Connecticut, were shattered by the loss of 18 children as young as five years old when gunman Adam Lanza burst into the school and began firing at random.

Some lawmakers have targeted President Barack Obama to do something about gun control, which is exactly what the president pledged to do on the campaign trail.

Barack Obama’s remarks came at the second presidential debate against Republican rival Mitt Romney at New York’s Hofstra University on October 16, when he invoked the memory of the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater massacre from several months earlier.

He said: “So my belief is that… we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill.

“We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement.”

Wiping away tears as he spoke on Friday, President Barack Obama today signaled he would push for tight gun control in the wake of the massacre of 26 at an elementary school in Connecticut, saying there had been “too many” mass shootings in America.

During a moving appearance, he said the time had come to “take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics”.

Barack Obama struggled for words, pausing several times as he wept and described the “beautiful little kids between the ages of five and ten years old” slaughtered in the school massacre in Connecticut.

Seldom has a head of state expressed greater public emotion in modern times, White House aides held hands and also wept as they sat in the briefing room named after James Brady, the press aide wounded in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan was shot and who later became the nation’s leading gun control advocate.

Barack Obama was not the only one who showed deep emotion over the shooting. Parents lined up at schools across the country to pick up their children and make sure they made it home safely.

School administrators from Washington D.C. to Boston and Iowa issued statements assuring parents that they had stepped up security and that their schools were still safe.