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1st LD Writethru: Obama says California mass shooting possibly terror-related or workplace-related

Xinhua, December 4, 2015 Adjust font size:

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Thursday the motives of shooters who killed 14 people at a Southern California social services center on Wednesday remained unclear, adding that the incident could be terror-related or workplace-related.

"At this stage, we do not yet know why the terrible event occurred," Obama told reporters after meeting his national security advisers at the White House.

"We don't know at this point the extent of their plans. We do not know their motivations," he added.

"It is possible that this was terrorist related. But we don't know. It is also possible that this was workplace related," he said.

Gunmen shot down 14 people on Wednesday at a Southern California social services center and injured 17 others. According to local police, "some degree of planning" was involved in the worst mass shooting of the year.

After a tense afternoon chase, two armed suspects were killed by police.

In his brief speech on Thursday, Obama assured the Americans that the authorities would get to the bottom of what happened, adding that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had took charge of the case.

Obama renewed calls for stricter gun control policy and said all Americans "have a part to play" in stopping gun violence.

It was the second mass shooting in six days. On Friday, a shooter attacked a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado, killing three and unjuried several more.

Following the 2012 school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, which claimed 28 lives, including 20 children, the Obama administration initiated but failed to push stronger gun control laws.

The laws, whose sections included expanded background checks and bans on assault weapons, were stymied in Congress after staunch opposition from Republican lawmakers and gun-rights lobby groups.

During his presidency, Obama has been confronted with more than a dozen of high-profile mass shootings, and in an interview earlier this year he called the failure to reform U.S. gun laws "one of the greatest frustrations" of his presidency.

"If you ask me where has been the one area where I feel that I've been most frustrated and most stymied, it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun safety laws, even in the face of repeated mass killings," Obama told BBC in July. Enditem