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US flags to fly at half-mast in honour of Gurdwara shooting victims
President Barack Obama has ordered the US flag to be flown at half mast until midnight on August 10 in honour of the victims of the gun attack on a Gurdwara in Wisconsin, which killed 7 and injured dozens of worshippers.
As investigators looked for a motive for Sunday's massacre, Mr Obama called for a "soul searching" to find ways to reduce gun-related violence in America.
The incident came just two weeks after a gunman opened fire at a film screening in Colorado killing 12 people.
"All of us are heartbroken by what's happened," Obama told reporters Monday after a bill signing ceremony at the White House office when asked if he would push for further gun control measures in the wake of the killings at the gurdwara in Oak Creeks.
"I think all of us recognize that these kinds of terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching and to examine additional ways that we can reduce violence," he said.
While, it was not yet fully know what motivated the gunman to carry out this terrible act, Obama said Americans would "recoil" in shock if it turns out, as some early reports indicate, that it may have been motivated in some way by the ethnicity of the worshippers.
"I think it will be very important for us to reaffirm once again that, in this country, regardless of what we look like, where we come from, who we worship, we are all one people, and we look after one another and we respect one another," he said.
Reports from America have suggested that gunman Wade Michael Page was linked to several white supremacist groups and was a member of a skinhead rock band called 'White Apathy'.
A YouTube video posted in 2009 of a song by Definite Hate, which appears to have been another Page band, shows a scroll of the lyrics that includes: "Wake Up, White man, For Your Race, And your land," and "Wake Up People Or Your Gonna Die!"
Page - who was shot dead by police at the scene of the White Oaks shooting on Sunday - served in the US military from 1992 to 1998 and was said to have been a psychological operations specialist.
Meanwhile Page's mother Laura Lynn has told the MailOnline that she has had no contact with her 41-year-old son since she and his father Jesse Alvin Page divorced.
"My heart goes out to all the people who lost their loved ones, that's all I can say, I am so sorry," Lynn said.
Lynn said: "He was such a precious little boy, that's all I can say, he was a very fun-loving, typical little boy. He was just a very soft spoken, gentle young man."
- UKAsian Staff
