Sandy Hook service remembers all victims of gun violence Miranda Pacchiana, centre, of Newtown, Conn., wipes her eye during a National Vigil for Victims of Gun Violence just prior to the first anniversary marking the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting at Washington National Cathedral on Thursday, in Washington. Washington: One by one the family members rose to stand before the altar at the Washington National Cathedral and tell their stories of loss in a service of remembrance of all victims of gun violence in America, marking the first anniversary of the massacre in Newtown. Organisers hoped that the service late on Thursday evening would help draw the focus away from the small town in Connecticut where 26 people, including 20 children, were killed by a gunman a year ago on Saturday. But the service was also defiantly political, with clergy and guests demanding politicians change America's gun laws. ""One year after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, we Americans still live with the epidemic scourge of gun violence,"" the Cathedral's Dean, the Reverend Gary Hall, said after bells had tolled for three minutes to mark the estimated 30,000 Americans killed by guns since Sandy Hook. ""A year ago next Sunday, I said from this pulpit that the gun lobby is no match for the cross lobby. I said that then, and I say it again now because I believe that the forces of love are finally greater and stronger than the forces of hatred."" The Reverend Mel Kawakami, senior minister at Newtown United Methodist Church, one of the conveners of the service, said: ""We gather to remember those who have lost their lives to gunfire,"" and noted the Scripture teaching: ""Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted."" Gilles Rousseau spoke of the murder of his daughter Lauren Rousseau, who had just become a full-time teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary when she was killed. As the gunman went about his rampage she read to her children to calm them. But others spoke of losing family members in other incidents around the nation - a man whose son was shot dead by a stranger as he dined in a restaurant with his wife, a woman whose 16-year-old daughter was shot in the head by a gunman with an AK-47 as she walked home in Washington, DC. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a delegate to the US Congressspoke angrily about how ""on this day, this very day"" a federal bill had been introduced to overturn DC's gun control regulations. Like those of the Australian Capital Territory, DC laws can be overturned by the federal government. She said what she found most jarring about gun violence in America was not just the number of deaths, but ""the number - the unfathomable number - per incident: Newtown, 26; our own Navy Yard, 12; Aurora, Colorado, 12; Virginia Tech, 32."" She said that though no significant federal gun control laws had passed Congress, the campaigners should maintain their pressure. ""I am not counseling patience my friends, I am counseling persistence."" She said Congress could not continue to resist the will of 90 per cent of the American people who supported universal background checks for gun buyers. In attendance were family members of at least one young man killed in last year's shooting in the cinema in Colorado, as well as one man who was shot three times at Virginia tech, and Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, who became an activist after his brother was gravely wounded by a gunman at the Empire State Building in 1997. Speaking after the service he told Fairfax Media that though gun control bills had failed to pass this year he remained optimistic, noting that the momentum for change that began with the Sandy Hook shootings had not dissipated. No public services will be held in Newtown on Saturday December 14, and it is understood that most major news outlets have decided not to visit the town, including CNN, Fox News, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, NPR, the New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post.