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President Obama spoke at a memorial service Sunday to honor the 12 victims of Monday's Navy Yard shootings.

"The tragedy and the pain that brings us here today is extraordinary. It is unique," he said.

But Obama also noted Monday's incident is the fifth mass shooting he has witnessed as president. "Once more, our hearts are broken," he said.

The president said he worried that there is a resignation that these types of tragedies are bound to happen.

"We must insist here today: There is nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work," he said.

He called on the nation to address gun violence, saying that resignation sometimes comes from a sense of political stagnation.

"By now, though, it should be clear that the change we need will not come from Washington, even when tragedy strikes Washington. Change will come the only way it ever has come, and that's from the American people," he said.

Before the Sunday afternoon service, the president and first lady Michelle Obama met with families who lost loved ones in Monday's attack. The violence took place less than three blocks away from the Marine barracks in southeast Washington, D.C.

The private memorial was held on the facility's parade grounds, where some 4,000 people attended. Speakers recalled the sense of duty and purpose of the victims, who ranged in age from 46 to 73.

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Early reports from the scene describe a mix of uniformed officers and civilians. Those in attendance included Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Earlier Sunday, gun rights activists took to the morning talk shows to speak against making new attempts to curb Americans' rights to own guns.

The head of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, said that more personnel at military facilities should be armed to try to stop such attacks.

Speaking on NBC's Meet the Press today, LaPierre said that in the case of the Navy Yard shooting, the problem was that too many people at the facility were unarmed.

"All these brave men and women that are trained in firearms, that signed up to serve in the military, they're largely disarmed on our military bases," LaPierre said. He recommended policy changes that would keep more military personnel armed.

"The problem is, there weren't enough good guys with guns," he said. "When the good guys with guns got there, it stopped."

LaPierre has made similar arguments in the past, including after the shootings last December at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.

That tragedy, in which school children lost their lives, prompted a push by the president and his allies to change America's gun control laws. But legislation that sprang from the effort failed to get out of the Democratically controlled Senate.

NPR's Liz Halloran noted the uncertainty over the nation's gun laws in a post earlier this week:

"The massacre of 20 school children and six adult school employees at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut last December took the nation to a place of horror that it had never visited.

"Yet little has changed since, leaving the political component of the debate in an uneasy state."

Update at 5:27 p.m. ET. President Obama Speaks:

The president made a point of saying this shooting was not "routine," but that it "echoes other recent tragedies." He noted that he has grieved with five communities at mass shootings as president, all of which "occur against a backdrop" of daily shootings.

Microsoft Corp. is expected to announce new Surface tablet computers, including a version with a smaller screen to compete with Google's Nexus 7 and Apple's iPad Mini.

The company has an announcement event scheduled in New York on Monday.

It comes about a month before Microsoft releases an update to its Windows 8 operating system on Oct. 17. Among other things, Windows 8.1 will be usable on smaller touch screens, which have become popular because they are cheaper and easier to carry. The previous version of Windows 8 was limited to tablets with 10-inch to 12-inch screens.

The new Surface tablets could also get lighter and thinner thanks to a processing chip that uses less energy and doesn't require a fan. Known as Haswell, the chip is already used in laptops from Apple, Samsung, Dell and other companies. Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air with Haswell gets up to 12 hours of use, compared with seven hours before.

Microsoft began selling Surface tablets last October, but sales have been slow. The company shipped about a million tablets in the first three months of 2013, according to research firm IDC. That includes about 260,000 of the slimmed-down RT version of Surface and 750,000 of the Pro version, which is compatible with older Windows programs. The shipments gave Microsoft a meager 2 percent share of the tablet market in the first quarter. By the second quarter, Microsoft tablets dropped out of IDC's Top 5.

Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., absorbed a $900 million charge in the April-June period to account for its expected losses from the Surface RT after it slashed prices to stimulate demand. The $150 cut brought the price of the Surface RT with 32 gigabytes of memory to $349. The Surface has a 10.1-inch screen measured diagonally. The RT version is 1.5 pounds. The Pro version is 2 pounds and starts at $799, $100 less than it was at launch.

Microsoft has manufactured devices before, such as its Xbox gaming console. In selling the Surface, the company became a competitor to its many manufacturing partners, which rely on its Windows operating system to power their machines. Microsoft is trying hard to succeed in tablets because personal computer sales are falling.

While there have been signs of a recovery, Graves says their benefits have not yet reached the bottom of the economic ladder.

"The recovery for many people has looked very different. The jobs that are coming back are some of the lowest paying jobs," she says.

Many jobs created since the end of the recession are in retail and food services and often do not pay enough to support families. Middle-income jobs that were once lifelines out of poverty have become more scarce, making it even more difficult for groups with some of the highest rates of poverty, including Latinos, African-Americans and single mothers.

Graves says in today's economy, having a job doesn't necessarily mean you're not scraping by.

"Even when women are working full-time, they may still be in poverty," she explains. "Even as the economy is doing better, women are not doing better."

Waiting In Line

In a suburban industrial park in Gaithersburg, Md., just outside the nation's capital, workers push a stacked cart full of snacks and produce through the Manna Food Center, a local distribution site for food donations where Yelba Mojica meets daily with struggling families.

"People that have never needed the food are coming to [Manna Food Center] and [asking], 'What do I have to do to qualify?' " Mojica says. "You see a lot of different people. You know, you see all walks of life who have never needed it in the past and all of a sudden, they do."

Judith Prado, a bus driver and single mother of three, never imagined waiting in line at a food pantry — until nine months ago, when her hours at work were cut and she had to choose between gas for her car or food for her family.

Al-Shabab, the Somali group that has claimed responsibility for the attack on a Nairobi mall, began as a group fighting inside its homeland. But it has evolved into an al-Qaida affiliate that draws members from other countries and views Somalia as a front in the war against the West.

Here are some key things to know about the group:

Who Are Al-Shabab?

Al-Shabab, or the Youth, is a Somali Islamist group that the U.S. regards as a terrorist organization.

The group grew out of the two decades of turmoil in Somalia following the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1991. By 2006, the Somali Council of Islamic Courts, the group to which al-Shabab was allied, controlled much of the southern portion of the country.

The council then set its sights on Somalia's weak transitional government. This deeply concerned Ethiopia, which backed the transitional government. Ethiopia sent in troops, defeated the council and took control of Mogadishu.

This was a turning point for al-Shabab.

"The only military force willing to resist the Ethiopians following the collapse of the ... [council], al Shabab was able to play on deep-seated Somali antipathy toward Ethiopia to recruit thousands of nationalist volunteers," wrote Rob Wise of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The National Counterterrorism Center notes the group continued its violent tactics in southern and central Somalia, where it held large swaths of territory.

But, it said, its "insurgency has been challenged over the past year by in-fighting and military pressure that has liberated key towns from al-Shabaab."

That military pressure comes in the form of a U.N.-backed African Union force that includes troops from Kenya and Uganda.

Nonetheless, said Mary Harper, the BBC's Africa editor and author of Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State, al-Shabab "still has the capacity to strike not just in Somalia, which it does regularly, but also across Somalia's borders."

What Does The Group Want?

The BBC's Harper told NPR's Tell Me More that the group's ideology has evolved since it "basically imploded" a few months ago. One faction wanted to keep the fighting inside Somalia; the other had global ambitions.

The latter faction is now dominant, Harper says, and therefore she was not surprised that its first major attack was outside Somalia.

The National Counterterrorism Center noted that the group isn't "centralized or monolithic" in its agenda or goals.

"Most of its fighters are predominantly interested in the nationalistic battle against the [transitional government] and not supportive of global jihad," it said.

Why Attack Kenya?

Kenyan troops entered Somalia in 2011, resulting in a loss of key territory for al-Shabab. The group had warned that it would target Kenya.

"The attack at Westgate Mall is just a very tiny fraction of what Muslims in Somalia experience at the hands of Kenyan invaders," al-Shabab said on Twitter.

In 2010, al-Shabab also took credit for two bombings in Uganda — which has also contributed to the AU force — killing more than 70 people.

As NPR's Frank Langfitt noted in his series from Somalia in 2010, al-Shabab's ideology was gaining ground among Somali refugees in the Nairobi neighborhood of Eastleigh, which is known as Little Mogadishu.

"The intelligence we have, we know there are elements sympathetic to al-Shabab," George Saitoti, head of Kenyan Internal Security, told Frank at the time. "And there may be some of them [al-Shabab operatives] around here."

U.S. Links

NPR's Dina Temple-Raston has reported on a "jihadi pipeline" for recruiting and sending Somali-Americans to the battlefields of Somalia. The head of Britain's MI-5 also warned of Britons training in al-Shabab camps.

The potential reach of the group was underscored by Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who told NPR this in an interview Sunday: "They don't have borders. Somalia might be where they have training centers or bomb-making factories or things like that, but, you know, the top leadership of Shabab, including those who have been killed recently ... was American citizens, British citizens who are the leading figures in the leadership of al-Shabab."

There are unconfirmed reports that some of the militants involved in the Westlake Mall siege were foreign nationals.

Further Reading

Dina's series The Somali-Minneapolis Terrorist Axis

Frank's series Containing Chaos: Somalia Today

Global Post on Al-Qaida In Africa