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1st LD: Obama calls for reckoning on gun violence after South Carolina hate crime shooting

Xinhua, June 19, 2015 Adjust font size:

U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday expressed anger over a black church massacre in the southeastern U.S. city of Charleston and said the country had to reckon with gun violence, a rampant violence only seen in the United States.

"I don't need to be constraint about the emotions that tragedies like this raise," said Obama in his first speech after the shooting spree at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. "I've had to make statements like this too many times."

"Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting a gun," said Obama, adding that gun violence only happened in the United States with such a frequency.

"This type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency," he said.

Earlier on Thursday, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white man identified by the police as the suspect, was caught about 14 hours after the shooting. Nine people, all black, were killed in the shooting Wednesday night and the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had already opened a hate crime investigation into the incident. Endite