The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

What Would Jamie Dimon Do? That’s a question investors need to answer before voting to split the chairman and chief executive roles at JPMorgan’s annual meeting next week. The risk is that shareholders score a corporate governance point but lose Dimon. As a general rule, cutting off your nose to spite your face is a bad investment strategy.

Dimon hasn’t come cheaply and he can be insufferable, like when he lambasted Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in public, even if he had a point. Now his board is warning shareholders that voting in favor of the split could be “disruptive” – a barely veiled threat that Dimon would leave. It’s a petulant response to the prospect of a majority of shareholders favoring an increasingly mainstream proposal. And it’s a worrying sign that Dimon and his directors are misaligned with JPMorgan’s owners.

Though a vote wouldn’t be binding, Wall Street’s top bank would be unable to ignore the wishes of the majority. Were he to leave just because of this, it would be akin to a baby throwing its toys out of the crib. Still, it’s hard to see him struggling to find a new gig. Warren Buffett, for one, has long admired his skills and praised his annual letter to shareholders.

Yet what should sway investors most are the returns they have received by owning JPMorgan stock during Dimon’s tenure. He officially took over as CEO at the end of 2005. Since then, JPMorgan shares are up about 22 percent. That’s a bit less than the S&P 500.

Compared to peers, however, JPM has outperformed, in some cases by leaps and bounds. Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs come closest, rising 19 percent and 16 percent, respectively. It’s no contest when it comes to Bank of America and Citigroup: these bank stocks lost 73 percent and 90 percent of their value in the same period.

As the investment industry is required to disclose, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. But JPMorgan’s feats with Dimon running the show before, during and after the worst financial crisis in decades ought to give pause to shareholders considering the governance question – no matter how bullied they might feel.

(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The
opinions expressed are his own)

By Rob Cox

NEW YORK, May 13 (Reuters Breakingviews) – What Would Jamie
Dimon Do? That’s a question investors need to answer before
voting to split the chairman and chief executive roles at
JPMorgan’s (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) annual meeting next week. The risk is that
shareholders score a corporate governance point but lose Dimon.
As a general rule, cutting off your nose to spite your face is a
bad investment strategy.

Dimon hasn’t come cheaply and he can be insufferable, like
when he lambasted Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in
public, even if he had a point. Now his board is warning
shareholders that voting in favor of the split could be
“disruptive” – a barely veiled threat that Dimon would leave.
It’s a petulant response to the prospect of a majority of
shareholders favoring an increasingly mainstream proposal. And
it’s a worrying sign that Dimon and his directors are misaligned
with JPMorgan’s owners.

Though a vote wouldn’t be binding, Wall Street’s top bank
would be unable to ignore the wishes of the majority. Were he to
leave just because of this, it would be akin to a baby throwing
its toys out of the crib. Still, it’s hard to see him struggling
to find a new gig. Warren Buffett, for one, has long admired his
skills and praised his annual letter to shareholders.

Yet what should sway investors most are the returns they
have received by owning JPMorgan stock during Dimon’s tenure. He
officially took over as CEO at the end of 2005. Since then,
JPMorgan shares are up about 22 percent. That’s a bit less than
the S&P 500.

Compared to peers, however, JPM has outperformed, in some
cases by leaps and bounds. Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs come
closest, rising 19 percent and 16 percent, respectively. It’s no
contest when it comes to Bank of America and Citigroup: these
bank stocks lost 73 percent and 90 percent of their value in the
same period.

As the investment industry is required to disclose, past
performance is no guarantee of future returns. But JPMorgan’s
feats with Dimon running the show before, during and after the
worst financial crisis in decades ought to give pause to
shareholders considering the governance question – no matter how
bullied they might feel.

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CONTEXT NEWS

– Two ranking JPMorgan Chase directors issued a letter to
shareholders on May 10 advising them not to vote in favor of
splitting the duties of Chairman and Chief Executive Jamie Dimon
and not to vote against some directors.

– The move to split the top two roles was instigated by the
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
pension plan managers and is to be voted on at JPMorgan Chase’s
annual meeting on May 21 in Tampa, Florida. Hermes Fund
Managers, The City of New York Comptroller’s Office and the
Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds are co-sponsors of
the proposal.

– The proposal states that the “requirement shall apply
prospectively so as not to violate any contractual obligation at
the time this resolution is adopted. Compliance with this policy
is waived if no independent director is available and willing to
serve as Chair.”

– The board is unanimous in its view that it is best for
Dimon to hold both roles and that the current governance
structure “is working effectively,” according to the letter
signed by presiding director Lee Raymond and William Weldon, who
is chairman of the corporate governance and nominating
committee.

– The letter warned that a vote against current directors or
to split the CEO and chairman roles “could be disruptive to the
company and is not in shareholders’ best interests.”

– JPMorgan Chase proxy: here

– Reuters: Dimon might leave JPMorgan if stripped of
chairmanship: WSJ [ID:nL2N0DS0FF]

RELATED COLUMNS

Junius Pile-on Morgan [ID:nL2N0DO0ZI]

Dimon’s rough spot [ID:nL1E8GMC20]

JPMorgan vs JPMorgan [ID:nL2N0CY0SW]

— For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can
click on [COX/]

(Editing by Antony Currie and Katrina Hamlin)

((rob.cox@thomsonreuters.com))

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Another day, another pressure point for JPMorgan. The latest rebuke of the U.S. bank’s board arrived on Tuesday from proxy adviser Glass Lewis, which like Institutional Shareholder Services helps investors make up their minds about how to vote at the annual meetings of companies. Both firms are now arguing for JPMorgan to split the roles of chairman and chief executive.

A year ago, making Jamie Dimon relinquish one of the titles would have been a profoundly punitive act. He’d only recently issued a mea culpa over the so-called “whale trade” that revealed the bank’s liquidity management office was effectively being run as a proprietary trading profit center. Though a noticeable blemish on Dimon’s tenure, for shareholders the kerfuffle amounted to a bottom-line blooper.

This time feels different. While there’s no doubt the $6 billion loss served as a reminder of JPMorgan’s complexity, there has been a noticeable shift among the American investing public on the philosophical and practical merits of appointing chairmen to companies that can help guide – and yes, hire and fire – chief executives.

If anything, the mistake in the approach of proxy advisers and other advocates for installing an independent chairman is that they’re approaching the matter selectively. By not issuing a blanket box-check, applicable to all companies regardless of the perceived superhumanity of the CEO, to vote in favor of a split, they do themselves a disservice.

With few exceptions, executives and their boards see a separation of the roles as a punitive response. As with Bank of America and the dearly departed Wachovia and Washington Mutual during the financial crisis, the decision was made to “strip” a title from a poorly performing executive rather than to assist the CEO by providing an able-bodied chairman to provide cover with regulators and shareholders.

It will be evident in a couple of weeks whether a majority of JPMorgan shareholders are swayed by ISS and Glass Lewis, after 40 percent voted to split the chairman and CEO roles last year. Imperial or not, though, Dimon has been a relatively good steward of the bank. A change in title alone would be an odd reason to hasten his succession.

Over time, all big and complicated companies should be governed by a chairman who can make, as Warren Buffett says, the decision about whether the right CEO is in place. To avoid the stigma, it should be all or none in Corporate America.

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

It took about a generation before Italian immigrants to the United States adopted the ways of their new home and shook off those of the old country. Italy’s premier industrial enterprise may do it in a matter of years. A spat over Fiat’s plans to fully acquire Chrysler, Detroit’s number three carmaker, could hasten the process.

Sergio Marchionne, Fiat chief executive and son of Italian migrants to Canada, is negotiating the purchase of the remaining 41.5 percent in Chrysler that is owned by a United Auto Workers healthcare trust. The two sides, who are some $3 billion apart on price, aired their disagreements about the negotiating process in a court hearing last week.

Despite the differences on valuation, there’s no doubt about the outcome. Marchionne has long envisioned a fully integrated Fiat-Chrysler as the first step in a continuing consolidation designed to squeeze out the excess capacity that plagues the car industry, particularly in Fiat’s home market.

Marchionne has barely hidden his concerns about Italy, which just barely managed over the weekend to form a new government. The economy has been stalled for a decade. Rigid labor rules stifle entrepreneurship and competition. Outside investment has dwindled and the stock market is a pale shade even of its former byzantine self.

The more Fiat is forced to pay for Chrysler, the more fresh equity it will need to raise to avoid a credit downgrade. One way to make that easier could be for Marchionne to structure the deal in two stages. First Fiat would buy Chrysler, then the combined company would offer new shares. This would look a bit like an initial public offering for the enlarged group, and a bit like a rights issue for existing Fiat shareholders.

New York offers a far bigger pool of investor capital than Milan. As with the merger of Fiat Industrial with CNH Global announced last year, that would give Marchionne a reason to shift the merged entity’s domicile and move its listing to the United States. An eventual deal on the value of the Chrysler stake could buttress the logic. At the mid-point of the two parties’ marks Chrysler’s equity, at $7.25 billion, would be more valuable than Fiat’s market cap of $6.9 billion. Once the arguments about the Detroit firm’s value are over, Fiat could be on the fast track toward U.S. citizenship.

INDIO, Calif, – Once upon a time, there was a rock music festival held every April in the California desert whose meticulous curation of artists old and new made it the de facto tastemaker for the industry. Today, there is just Coachella. And although this three-day frolic in the sun may no longer be the most influential gathering of its kind, it has achieved something potentially even larger – an ability to sustain itself.

The three-day music marathon concluded its second weekend on Sunday, selling some 150,000 passes in total and making it the most-successful festival of its kind with gross receipts of about $50 million, according to Billboard. Almost 150 bands, musicians and performance artists made the trek to Indio, a scruffy suburb of Palm Springs, on two successive weekends to play on one of a half-dozen stages.

On this, the 14th Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, it would not be far off to say the event’s financial success has eclipsed its influence. Coachella once was the premier showcase for bands on the precipice of breaking out ‑ Arcade Fire or LCD Soundsystem come to mind – or those re-forming ‑ such as Pavement or Rage Against the Machine – to play for audiences who rediscovered their music.

Yet 2013 may prove to be the year that the festival, and the Coachella brand, transcended the music. Look no further than this year’s lineup. As music bloggers have remarked, Coachella 2013 was notably light on big names or breakout performers. The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Blur, main stage headliners on Friday and Sunday, long ago reached their peaks of popularity. Saturday’s closing acts were New Order, Sigur Ros and Phoenix. The latter, the youngest of the bunch, played the main stage. But having been active as long as Coachella has been in existence, Phoenix is hardly a breakout act.

There wasn’t even a major first-time reunion draw, one of the most successful Coachella features. British New Wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark played for the first time on American shores in years. But not only did it play one of the smaller stages, the Gobi Tent, it played third fiddle to electronic acts Dub FX and Disclosure.

Yet despite a lackluster lineup, tickets sold out for both weekends. Most were sold even before the lineup had been officially announced. True, three-day general admission passes were advertised on the Internet for as little as half the $349 face value right up until the second weekend kickoff. But the crowds that jammed into Indio’s Empire Polo Grounds suggested there were not many unused wristbands.

Ironically, these queuing masses are an indication not just of Coachella’s popularity but also of the festival’s ability to remain relevant even after its role as tastemaker has diminished. In a sense, what looks like a security gantlet designed to inconvenience may be best viewed as a reflection of sound long-term risk management.

After 9/11, Americans found their travel lives had been altered permanently by stepped-up security measures, having to arrive extra-early at the airport or having to doff shoes for the metal detector. Post-Boston, Americans must adjust to terror of a more random sort, something that can turn any gathering of citizens, such as those waiting at the finish line of a race, into a lethal tragedy. Coachella’s organizers appear to have understood this well before Boston, though security was stepped up in subtle ways between weekend one and weekend two.

The venue is surrounded by a veritable ziggurat of metal fencing and checkpoints. The full-body pat-downs begin about half a mile from the festivities. Girls to the left, where a female guard runs her hands up, down, even around the underside of their breasts. Men queue to the right, where they must empty their pockets, and turn their back to the guard and submit. Pockets, even wallets, are randomly searched.

An elderly concertgoer was busted with two joints in his pack of Marlboros and escorted to the “Amnesty Box,” where he was forced to dump his delicately rolled cigarillos. I was asked to tip my hat to ensure there was nothing hiding above my scalp or in the underside of my cap. After all this, festivalgoers must present their wristbands to an electronic reader.

A couple hundred yards later, through various horse gates, miles of additional fencing and a merger with another lane of pedestrians coming from the parking area, attendees are subjected to an identical security check. Once inside the grounds, buying a beer requires another set of security checks. Apart from the line to present identification, each beer garden entry is manned by three people checking wristbands.

Now, to experienced concertgoers, Coachella’s combination of a so-so musical lineup and airport-like security may not sound like a winning formula. But the veterans and music geeks are only along for the ride at this point. Coachella’s promoter, Goldenvoice, a division of the Anschutz Entertainment Group, has achieved something else.

Creating a safe environment – like a mall where even rainy-day music lovers get to sample a broad array of artists, including some like Nick Cave that would not normally get to play in front of a large crowd – is what makes Coachella sustainable, commercially and culturally.

For older folks (such as this author) unaccustomed to passing through Checkpoint Charlie for a concert, for post-Boston America the combination just might be sufficient for me to allow my children to attend. That suggests a viable business that crosses generations ‑ even if it is just a big party.

PHOTO: Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers performs during the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California April 14, 2013. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

Volvo’s timing was good. From its introduction of a little invention that became the modern seatbelt in 1958 to its sale some 40 golden years later to Ford Motor, public consciousness in automotive safety blossomed. Volvo’s technological lead gave it an edge over rivals who showed less interest in protecting passengers than revving up horsepower.

Something similar could happen to gunsmiths following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December. After all, it took public outrage over horrific automobile fatalities, which peaked at around 55,000 in the early 1970s, to force legislative changes.

Yet innovations by the likes of Volvo showed that market forces could also play a role, not just in fostering good public policy but in creating lucrative businesses.

At present, most gun marketing in the United States is predicated on power and machismo. But what if the unique selling point of a weapon became safety features, like a trigger that only works in the hands of the gun’s owner? That, in a nutshell, is the aim of the Sandy Hook Promise Innovation Initiative, a program unveiled in San Francisco on Thursday.

The initiative will pull together leading lights from the technology and venture capital communities to form a Technology Committee to Reduce Gun Violence, which will work to identify, vet, and foster innovations in gun and school safety and mental health research. The group, which is working with Sandy Hook Promise – the non-profit group that I and other Newtown citizens created after the shootings of 20 schoolkids and six educators in our town – will solicit proposals for the best ideas and prototypes in these areas and award a prize to encourage the most promising innovations.

The point is that making firearms safer could help the nation to reduce the 30,000 gun deaths a year, including nearly 19,000 that are suicides. But if that isn’t incentive enough, there’s the money, and the Volvo lesson, to consider.

So let’s do a little drive into automotive history. In 1961, a few years after Volvo introduced the three-point seatbelt designed by inventor Nils Bohlin, the company sold around 13,000 cars in the United States. Over the next few years, Volvo added to its safety features, putting the same belts in back seats, and in 1968 head restraints. Within a decade, Volvo had quadrupled its American sales.

While all car sales decelerated during the 1970s oil embargo, the company kept on innovating and marketing itself as the safe carmaker. By the time the first mandatory seatbelt-use law was enacted in the state of New York in 1984, Volvo’s market share was approaching a peak. The 1990s were fruitful for Volvo, as a newfound awareness of the potential for technological advances to reduce car fatalities took hold.

In 1991, Volvo introduced a side-impact protection system. By 1995, every U.S. state but one made seatbelts compulsory. By 1998, dual airbags became standard for all passenger vehicles. All the while, Volvo’s U.S. sales surged above the 100,000 mark.

At what may have been a high point in automotive safety innovation – fatalities had fallen by a quarter from 1972 to around 41,000 in 1999 – Volvo sold itself to Ford for a cool $6.5 billion. But after that, rivals caught up as Ford faltered heavily even in the years before the financial crisis. Daimler’s Mercedes took the safety lead, and Volvo was sold in 2010 for $1.8 billion to China’s Zhejiang Geely.

Budding entrepreneurs in the gun world could become rich by emulating Volvo’s winning years. Weapons manufacturers could first and foremost tout their products’ safety features. And public policy could guide them along that path. New Jersey, for instance, has a law on the books that would require smart gun technology in all new handguns sold three years after the state’s attorney general determines a prototype is safe and commercially available. Other states are considering similar rules.

As the Volvo story underlines, however, government action isn’t the only way to reduce America’s gun fatalities, which have remained stubbornly high for decades. One thing that may be even more characteristically American than gun ownership is the impulse to create wealth in free and open markets. Let the innovation begin.

PHOTO: Hampus Olsson, an analysis engineer, checks a test dummy before a crash at the Volvo Safety Centre in Gothenburg April 9, 2008. REUTERS/Bob Strong

Shamefully, neither had I until two weeks ago, when I stumbled across a card sent to the Sandy Hook Elementary School. My 12-year-old son and I were combing through a dozen boxes, from among the tens of thousands of cards and letters that have arrived at our town hall. We were looking for artwork we could use to decorate the office walls of Sandy Hook Promise, the nonprofit I co-founded with fellow citizens to help our community heal and eventually find its voice on matters related to eliminating gun violence

The card is simple – one page of white paper, folded and adorned with a valentine on the front. Inside, another heart, with a message in red marker: “Stay Strong + Stay United. In Chardon We Are One Heartbeat.” At first glance, there was nothing that distinguished this letter from the millions of others carrying similarly lovely sentiments. That was until I read the blue cursive writing inside.

“Ten months after our school shooting at Chardon High School on Feb. 27, 2012, we are still healing and supporting each other. We still have the red ribbons tied around trees, up on houses and various places in town.” Gutted and embarrassed that Chardon had not registered in the least, I turned to the Internet.

It turns out that on that day in the school cafeteria, 17-year-old T.J. Lane fired 10 shots from a .22-caliber semiautomatic Ruger handgun, a weapon he obtained from his uncle’s home the night before. Demetrius Hewlin, 16; Daniel Parmentor, 16; and Russell King, 17, died from their wounds. Three other teenagers were injured. (On Tuesday, Lane pleaded guilty to multiple homicide charges.)

How could it be that none of my unusually plugged-in friends, acquaintances or contacts ‑ with their top-shelf educations and access to information ‑ recalled what happened at Chardon, whose grim one-year anniversary approaches on Wednesday?

More than anything, this seemingly collective failure to recognize Chardon’s tragedy embodies what the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan railed against in a classic 1993 essay on the subject of violence. “The amount of deviant behavior in American society,” Moynihan wrote in the American Scholar, has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.”

The definition of deviancy, of course, has been the subject of much cultural warfare. But when it comes to violence, Moynihan’s warning is without controversy. It would appear that we have become inured not just to the awful shootings that take place every day in our cities but even to those exceptional acts of mass violence in seemingly peaceful hamlets like Chardon, and now Newtown.

Indeed, as I learned more about Chardon, I thought: What if a year ago, I had acted differently when those three boys, not much older than my own sons, were gunned down at their school? What if even a slice of the efforts I’ve dedicated to Sandy Hook Promise had been expended last February? What if a group like ours had formed in Chardon?

Could we have changed the course of events by asking for greater school safety measures; questioning the efficacy of mental health and wellness programs for teenagers and young adults; giving parents more tools to handle the most important undertaking of their lives; or urging legislators to insist on more robust gun regulations? If I hadn’t defined deviancy downward such that Chardon made so little difference to my consciousness a year ago, could I have helped prevent the massacre in my town.

Tussling with hypothetical questions like these is pointless. We can’t beat ourselves up for what we did not do. But as a nation, it is clear we must change. Twenty beautiful children never got off their yellow school bus to go home on Dec. 14. Six of their teachers never came home to their families. There is no excuse for inaction.

PHOTO: A memorial is seen as Chardon Local School District buses arrive for the first day of regular schedule classes since the school shootings in Chardon, Ohio March 2, 2012.REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

This column was originally published in the Wall Street Journal.

NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT – The word “community” is overused. It is even the title of a television sitcom. But in the context of Newtown – the Connecticut town of 27,000 that I’ve known as home since 1969 – it is authentic. Yet from within our midst came Adam Lanza, now a murderer of 20 innocent local children, six of their dedicated teachers, and his own mother.

Today the world is focused on our heretofore-bucolic slice of America. As the international media’s satellite dishes sprout and their choppers descend to dissect the shooting and the shooter, Newtown is mostly presented as either an affluent suburb of New York or a picture-perfect New England hamlet with old-timey colonial houses, horse farms and a historic Main Street.

Neither characterization does it justice. To live here is to know why, after two decades of global wandering, I returned eight years ago to raise my family.

I never expected to come back to Newtown. But as my two boys – born in Milan and London – began their schooling, it became obvious that of all the places I could choose to live, none was better. My parents would be nearby, and I knew the quality of the schools, with their committed teachers and involved parents, because both my brother and I attended them from K-12. Even more than all that, it was Newtown’s sense of being one town – albeit encompassing many differences- that made it so unlike any of the other places I had lived.

Yes, it is also charming. Take a stroll on Main Street from the iconic flagpole that marks the spiritual center of town, as hundreds of journalists will in the days ahead and as every politician does during the Labor Day parade. There is the Newtown Meeting House, a church first constructed in 1720 and best known for the weather vane on its steeple.

According to a tale that is almost certainly apocryphal – and may never seem quite the same again – French troops under Gen. Rochambeau shot the rooster, now the town symbol, while quartered down the street in Ram’s Pasture in 1781. That’s the field where, every Thanksgiving morning, there is a spontaneous game of flag football. Now it is a place of vigil.

On Halloween, Newtown’s children converge on its sidewalks, placed as they are at a safe distance from the road. They trick-or-treat from colonial to colonial, most of which are gamely decked out in all manner of spookiness. Knowing that Main Street’s homeowners have opened their doors to their children and kept them off the more darkened, rural streets of the town, residents contribute generously to a candy bank at the local Big Y and Caraluzzi’s supermarkets.

Further along Main Street, just beyond the old general store serving Flagpole sandwiches and the mutually owned Newtown Savings Bank, stands the Edmond Town Hall cinema. Twice every evening, except on Thursdays, this municipally run institution shows movies—nothing fancy, usually out-of-date—for $2. The cinema, site of many first dates and perhaps even first kisses, has been a haven for generations of parents, including my own, giving their kids an early glimpse of independence.

Onward, up the street, is the Honan Funeral Home. Nothing in its history has prepared Dan Honan for the week of grieving that approaches. I first entered the place as a teenager after four of my contemporaries were killed in a car crash preceded by a police chase. I didn’t sleep for weeks. I wondered then how such a horrific thing could happen in my town. And now something far worse has occurred, something beyond what any community can possibly understand.

We still don’t know all the facts of Friday’s killings. And for now the priority is to support those most directly affected. What we do know is that, from now on, when my children tell people they hail from Newtown, there will be immediate recognition, even perhaps a stigma. The times over the past 45 years that I had to correct acquaintances (“No, it’s Newtown, not Newton”) won’t be repeated, thanks to one of our own. The 20-year-old Lanza had attended the town’s public schools, batted on its sports fields, and played with its children.

There can be no explanation for his behavior, no motive. We can only ask questions. How did Lanza have access to an arsenal of weapons at home? Did his mother seek help for him? If he had changed for the worse, were his peers or neighbors aware? Could they, or we, have done more to involve him in our community? Did the law, and our Constitution, make his massacre easier to carry out?

In the end, we may arrive at answers that help make it less likely that tragedies like Newtown’s will recur. That won’t ever heal the suffering of the victims’ families. Nor will it salve the collective grief that I know my neighbors, my children, my wife and I are grappling with. Dealing with that will require us to recognize Adam Lanza as one of us, and explore what that means for each of us in Newtown. It will be painful. At least we can be confident our community will pull together.

PHOTO: A woman wrapped in a Red Cross blanket holds a candle outside Newtown High School where U.S. President Barack Obama was speaking at a vigil for families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut December 16, 2012.  REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Obama’s appearance at an interfaith vigil in the once-tranquil town of Newtown will be watched closely for clues as to what he meant when he called for “meaningful action” to prevent such tragedies in the wake of the massacre on Friday.

But politics will take a back seat to grieving, as more details emerge about the 12 girls, eight boys and six adult women that gunman Adam Lanza killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School before killing himself.

Olivia Engel had a part in a nativity play at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church. “She was supposed to be an angel in the play. Now she’s an angel up in heaven,” Monsignor Robert Weiss told a standing-room-only crowd at the church before the play on Saturday.

Emilie Parker, another of the child victims, was studying Portuguese with her father. A Facebook memorial page for her already had nearly 147,000 “likes” as of Saturday night.

Vicki Leigh Soto, 27, saved her first-grade students’ lives by putting herself between the kids and the gunman. Britain’s Independent on Sunday newspaper splashed her photo on its front page with the caption “The Heroine of Sandy Hook.”

School district officials said classes would resume Tuesday, except for Sandy Hook – as of Saturday night, they were still working on a plan for how and where to let the school’s kindergarten-through-4th-grade classes resume.

STILL LOOKING FOR ANSWERS

Obama plans to travel to the affluent town of 27,000 people about 80 miles from New York City to meet with victims’ families and speak at the vigil at 7 p.m. local time (0000 GMT on Monday).

Though Americans have seen many mass shootings in the past decades, the victims have rarely been so young. On Saturday, some Democratic lawmakers called for sweeping new gun-control measures, a move certain to run up against stiff opposition from the nation’s powerful pro-gun lobby.

While the president and families mourn, police are still pushing for a fuller explanation of what drove Lanza, 20, to apparently kill his mother at her house, go to Sandy Hook Elementary, shoot out a window and storm through the school with multiple weapons.

Police earlier said they had assembled “some very good evidence” on the killer’s motives.

He had struggled at times to fit into the community and his mother Nancy pulled him out of school for several years, to home-school him, said Louise Tambascio, the owner of My Place Restaurant, where his mother was a long-time patron.

Nancy Lanza legally owned a Sig Sauer and a Glock, both handguns commonly used by police, and a military-style Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine, according to law enforcement officials, who also said they believed Adam Lanza used at least some of those weapons.

His father issued a statement saying the family was in a “state of disbelief.”

The death toll exceeded that of one of the most notorious U.S. school shootings, the 1999 rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where two teenagers killed 13 students and staff before fatally shooting themselves.

At Virginia Tech, a Blacksburg, Virginia university where in 2007 a gunman killed 32 people in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, an announcer extended sympathies to the residents of Newtown before a basketball game on Saturday.

(Additional reporting by Dan Burns, Edward Krudy, Edith Honan, Chris Kaufman, Dave Gregorio, Colleen Jenkins, Martinne Geller and Chris Francescani; Writing by Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Paul Simao)

Dressed in “cute kid stuff,” all 20 died when a heavily armed 20-year-old gunman forced his way into their school, Sandy Hook Elementary, and shot them and six women in an act of violence that has shattered their once-tranquil suburban town.

“They were first-graders,” said Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, before releasing the names of all the victims of the school shootings on Saturday.

Asked to describe the attack, Carver, who oversaw the autopsies of all the victims and conducted many himself, called it “the worst I have seen.”

The shooter, identified by law enforcement officials as Adam Lanza, killed his mother Nancy on Friday, then drove to the school where he gunned down another 26 people before taking his own life in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.

He fired a rifle, shooting his victims multiple times. Parents identified their children through pictures, a process intended to minimize their shock, Carver said.

Police did not officially identify Lanza or his mother.

Members of the close-knit community went into public mourning on Saturday as the depth of the tragedy became clear.

“I don’t know how to get through something like this,” said Robbie Parker, a 30-year-old physician’s assistant whose 6-year-old daughter Emilie was among the dead.

“My wife and I don’t understand how to process this and how to get our lives going,” Parker told reporters. Emilie, the oldest of his three children, Parker said, “could just light up a room.”

While Americans have seen many mass shootings in the past decades, the victims have rarely been so young. On Saturday, some Democratic lawmakers called for sweeping new gun-control measures, a move certain to run up against stiff opposition from the nation’s powerful pro-gun lobby.

President Barack Obama, who a day earlier was moved to tears on national television by the tragedy, called for “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,” but stopped short of specifically calling for tighter gun-control laws.

CHRISTMAS TREE MEMORIAL

Townsfolk packed into the church memorial services held throughout the day. On Saturday night, the pews at St. Rose of Lima were packed with parishioners standing at the rear of the church.

At least one person was missing – 6-year-old Olivia Engel, who was to have had a role in the Nativity concert.

“She was supposed to be an angel in the play,” said Revered Robert Weiss. “Now she’s an angel up in heaven.”

Town fire officials set up 26 Christmas trees, decorated with stuffed animals, near the school as a memorial to the victims – many of whom were children who may have been hoping for such toys as their own holiday presents. Churches held memorial services.

“Those innocent little boys and girls were taken from their families far too soon,” said Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy. “Let us all hope and pray those children are now in a place where that innocence will always be protected.”

One of the victims, Josephine Gay, had celebrated her seventh birthday on Tuesday.

Rabbi Shaul Praver said he had spent time with Veronika Pozner, whose 6-year-old son Noah, was among the victims.

“She said that she didn’t know how she was going to go on, and we encouraged her to focus on her other four children that need her and not to try to plan out the rest of her life, just take a deep breath right now,” Praver said.

The adult victims, some of whom died defending the students, ranged in age from 27 to 56. Carver, the medical examiner, said all the bodies had examined had been shot with a rifle. He said he and his staff had not yet examined the shooter or his mother.

MOTIVES EMERGING

Police earlier said they had assembled “some very good evidence” on the killer’s motives.

“Our investigators at the crime scene … did produce some very good evidence in this investigation that our investigators will be able to use in, hopefully, painting the complete picture as to how – and more importantly why – this occurred,” Connecticut State Police Lieutenant Paul Vance told reporters.

Yale-New Haven Hospital opened a crisis-intervention centre in the wealthy suburb of 27,000 people about 80 miles (130 km) from New York City.

The killer’s mother, Nancy Lanza, legally owned a Sig Sauer and a Glock, both handguns commonly used by police, and a military-style Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine, according to law enforcement officials, who also said they believed Adam Lanza used at least some of those weapons.

The death toll exceeded that of one of the most notorious U.S. school shootings, the 1999 rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where two teenagers killed 13 students and staff before fatally shooting themselves.

Around the nation communities took small steps to mark the tragedy.

At Virginia Tech, a Blacksburg, Virginia university where in 2007 a gunman killed 32 people in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, an announcer extended sympathies to the residents of Newtown before a basketball game.

“This campus … shares a deep sense of grief,” the announcer said. “We share that pain and we open our hearts to that community.”

(The story corrects spelling of Rabbi Shaul Praver’s surname from Paver, paragraphs 19-20)

(Additional reporting by Edward Krudy, Edith Honan, Chris Kaufman, Dave Gregorio, Colleen Jenkins and Chris Francescani; Writing by Scott Malone and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Will Dunham and Eric Walsh)