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Gunman in Oregon massacre killed himself: Police

Chris Harper Mercer, the 26-year-old was a student at Umpqua Community College in Oregon enrolled in the class where he opened fire on Thursday.

The shooter in the mass shooting at an Oregon community college committed suicide after a shootout with police, police has said.

The gunman, identified as Chris Harper Mercer, opened fire on Thursday inside a classroom at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, killing his English professor and eight others. Several people were also wounded.

Investigators had previously claimed the 26-year-old man was shot and killed by the police officers who arrived on the crime scene within minutes and exchanged fire with him almost immediately.

However, Douglas County sheriff John Hanlin told reporters on Saturday that the state medical examiner had determined that Mercer died of an apparent self-inflicted wound.

An official on Friday said 13 weapons were recovered from the shooter, who was a student at Umpqua Community College enrolled in the class where he opened fire.

The deadly rampage at Umpqua is the 294th mass shooting event in 2015, according to statistics collected by the website Shootingtracker.com, which defines a mass shooting where 4 or more people are shot.

People attend a candlelight vigil in Roseburg, Oregon late on October 1, 2015, for nine people killed and seven others wounded in a shooting at a community college in the US state of Oregon. (AFP photo)

America’s gun violence goes deeper. The number of intentional homicides by guns was 11,208 in 2013, the last year for which US health authorities have statistics.

On Friday, the United Nations asked the United States to take measures to reduce gun violence following the Oregon shooting.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned about the high death toll that US gun violence is inflicting on American lives.

"The secretary general expresses his strong hope that the United States, through the robust democratic process that characterizes it, will be able to take the necessary action to reduce the appalling toll in human life that gun violence is taking on American society," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.


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