DUSHANBE, December 3, 2015, Asia-Plus – International media outlets report that 14 people were killed and at least 17 others wounded in the attack at a Southern California social service center Wednesday.
The gunmen, wearing military-style clothing and armed with long guns, opened fire at the Inland Regional Center, which helps adults with disabilities.
The attack reportedly took place in a conference area where the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health was holding a social event.
According to
BBC
, FBI officials said they do not yet know if it was a terrorist attack but local police said it might have been domestic terrorism.
President Barack Obama has responded to the shooting. “One thing we do know is that we have a pattern of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere in the world,” he said.
“There are some steps that we could take, not to eliminate all incidents, but to make sure they happen less frequently.”
Meanwhile
Reuters
reports a man and a woman suspected of taking part in the attack died in a shootout with police hours later.
The suspects fled the scene of the shooting in San Bernardino, about 100 kilometers east of Los Angeles, and two people died a few hours later in a shootout when police confronted them in their getaway vehicle. One police officer was injured.
Reuters
says the shooting rampage at a holiday party on the campus of a an agency that serves the developmentally disabled marked the deadliest U.S. gun violence since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, in which 27 people, including the gunman, were killed.
At a news conference called by the Los Angeles area chapter of the Muslim advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a man who identified himself as Farhan Khan said his sister was married to one of the suspects and he offered his condolences to the victims.
“Why would he do that? Why would he do something like this? I have absolutely no idea, I am in shock myself,” Khan said at a news conference in Anaheim, California, south of Los Angeles.
Farook and his wife have been missing since Wednesday morning, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR in the Los Angeles area.
According to
Reuters
, a person by the name of Syed Farook was listed on county documents as an employee of the San Bernardino County Environmental Health Department. Staff members from that department had gathered on Wednesday for the party where the shooters opened fire.
The massacre reportedly differed from most other recent U.S. killing sprees in key ways, including the involvement of multiple people rather than a lone perpetrator. It also comes less than three weeks after the deadly attacks in Paris prompted tighter security at many public venues across the United States.
So far in 2015, there have been more than 350 shootings in which four or more people were wounded, according to the crowd-sourced website shootingtracker.com, which keeps a running tally of U.S. gun violence,
Reuters
said.
The shooting in California comes less than a week after a gunman killed three people and wounded nine in a shooting rampage at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In October, a gunman killed nine people at a college in Oregon, and in June, a white gunman killed nine black churchgoers in South Carolina.
Reuters
reports that gun control advocates, including Democratic President Barack Obama, say easy access to firearms is a major factor in the shooting epidemic, while the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun advocates say the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans the right to bear arms.
