Mass shootings roil US politics anew

Crusius worked at a movie theater concession stand, according to a LinkedIn profile. In a screenshot from security footage at the Walmart, he is seen wearing noise-canceling headphones, wielding an assault rifle. The store, popular with shoppers from both sides of the border, is 650 miles west of where Crusius lived.

The El Paso shooting is the eighth-deadliest in modern US history, after a 1984 shooting in San Ysidro, California, also a border town, in which 21 people died.

El Paso is across the border from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The El Paso del Norte Port of Entry is among the busiest US border crossings. Since last year, a large number of migrants from Central America have been arriving to seek asylum in the US.

"The border is an important symbol of fear and loathing in the broader political context around immigration," Joe Heyman, director of the University of Texas El Paso's Center for Interamerican and Border Studies, told the El Paso Times.

Mexico's Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Sunday that Mexico will take legal actions to protect its citizens in the US. Three Mexicans were killed and nine injured in the El Paso shooting.

"The president has instructed me to ensure that Mexico's indignation translates into ... efficient, prompt, expeditious and forceful legal actions for Mexico to take a role and demand that conditions are established that protect ... Mexicans in the United States," Ebrard said in a video on Twitter.

In Ohio, Dayton Assistant Police Chief Matt Carper told reporters that the shooting began at 1 am local time in the Oregon District, a historic neighborhood known for nightclubs, restaurants, art galleries and shops.

The newspaper cited a Facebook post from James Wilson, who said he was a customer sitting on a patio just outside the Ned Peppers bar when the shooting occurred outside.

"He (a gunman) tried to get into the bar but did not make it through the door," Wilson wrote. "Someone took the gun from him and he got shot and is dead."

Deb Decker, a spokeswoman for emergency services in Montgomery County, Ohio, told CNN the assailant had been making his way to Ned Peppers from another bar when someone grabbed the barrel of his rifle, and he drew a handgun, but was then shot as police arrived.

Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley said the suspect wore body armor and fired a rifle with .223-caliber rounds from high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Four women and five men ranging in age from 22 to 57 died in the shooting.

Had police officers not confronted the suspect as quickly as they did, "hundreds of people in the Oregon District could be dead today", the mayor said.

The Dayton Daily News reported that Betts once had a "hit list" at his high school and quoted a former classmate who said Betts had a plan "to shoot up the school".

On July 28, Santino William Legan, 19, shot and killed three people, including two children, at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Northern California, before fatally shooting himself.

In 2019, there have been 32,998 violent gun incidents in the US, including 250 mass shootings, in which 8,712 people were killed, according to Gun Violence Archive.

Lia Zhu in San Francisco and Reuters contributed to this story.