At least 10 people, including the gunman himself, died in a shooting at a community college in the U.S. northwestern state of Oregon Thursday, according to the state police.
The gunman, identified by U.S. media as 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer, opened fire Thursday morning at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, about 290 km south of Portland, Oregon's largest city.
Mercer killed nine people before dying during an exchange of gunfire with police officers. It wasn't clear whether Mercer was killed by authorities or took his own life.
According to Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin, that 10 dead and another seven injured is the "best, most accurate information we have at this time."
Among the injured, three in critical condition were transferred to hospitals in the area of Eugene, the second largest city in the state, Hanlin said.
State Police Superintendent Richard Evans said law enforcement received an alert at 10:38 a.m. local time (1738 GMT).
Four guns were recovered at the scene, according to local news reports.
Ray Shoufler, a fire marshal of Douglas County, was quoted by local media as saying that the shooting took place inside classrooms at the two-year school with some 3,300 full-time students.
According to witnesses, the shooter, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, opened fire in a classroom in Snyder Hall and moved to other rooms methodically gunning down his victims.
Kortney Moore, 18, told the local News-Review newspaper that she was in her writing class in Snyder Hall when a gunshot came through the window and struck her teacher in the head.
Moore said the gunman then entered the classroom and told people to get on the ground. He asked them to stand up and state their religion before he started shooting.
Stacy Boylan, whose daughter was wounded in the shooting, told CNN that the gunman ordered students to stand up if they were Christian and then shot them.
"They would stand up and he said 'Good, because you're a Christian, you're going to see God in just about one second'," Boylan said.
Student Cassandra Welding told CNN that she was in a classroom when she heard 35 to 40 shots coming from an adjacent room.
Authorities said they were investigating the motive of the shooter.
Religious and racial intolerance has become one of the reasons that possibly led to several shootings in the United States in recent years.
On June 17, 2015, a white man opened fire in a historic black church, in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people, including a pastor, during a prayer meeting. The suspect was arrested the next day for what authorities called a hate crime.
The massacre in the Oregon college is the latest in a series of mass shootings at U.S. schools, movie theaters, military bases and churches in recent years. The killings have fueled demands for more gun control in the country, where ownership of firearms is protected by the Second Amendment of the Constitution.
President Barack Obama, in his 15th statement on mass shootings since taking office, slammed Congress and gun-rights lobby groups for obstructing reforms of gun control laws.
"Somehow this has become routine," Obama said. "The reporting is routine. My response here, at this podium, ends up being routine ... We've become numb to this."
"Someone will comment and say, 'Obama politicized this issue,'" said Obama. "This is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic."
Also in his speech Thursday, Obama called on U.S. gun owners "who are using those guns properly, safely" to start questioning whether the gun-rights lobby group represents their views.
Obama did not mention the National Rifle Association by name, but his remarks hit flat on the powerful organization which holds sway in Washington.
"We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction," Obama added.
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 commonsense gun safety laws, even in the face of repeated mass killings," Obama told BBC in July.
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