President Barack Obama reiterated his call for more gun control reforms to make mass shootings in the U.S. “rare as opposed to normal” in the wake of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
Speaking to CBS News moments after news broke of the shooting, Obama called for “common sense gun safety laws” and urged lawmakers to pass a law to prevent individuals on the “No Fly List” who are barred from boarding commercial flights from legally purchasing firearms.
“We don’t yet know what the motives of the shooters are but what we do know is that there are steps we can take to make Americans safer,” Obama said in the interview. “We should never think that this is just something that just happens in the ordinary course of events because it doesn’t happen with the same frequency in other countries.”
Obama said the pattern of U.S. mass shootings “has no parallel anywhere else in the world.”
Emergency personnel responded late Wednesday morning to reports of a shooting that killed or injured as more than 20 people, according to law enforcement.
Law enforcement officials are now on the lookout for as many as three suspects believed to be armed with AK-47-type weapons who reportedly fled the scene of the shooting in a black SUV.
It is unclear as of now who the suspects are and what the motives were behind the shooting.
Obama had been briefed on the shooting by his homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco moments before speaking with CBS News for a prescheduled interview.
Obama has spoken forcefully about the need for additional gun control laws to reduce the number of mass shootings in the country in the wake of past incidents in the country.
Speaking to reporters in Paris just a day earlier, Obama touched on the news of a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic on Friday in which a lone gunman killed three people.
“I mean, I say this every time we go one of these mass shootings, this just doesn’t happen in other countries,” Obama said Tuesday.