This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The gunman who opened fire in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine people early Sunday, was armed with a high-powered rifle and a 100-round magazine before police shot him dead within 30 seconds of his beginning a rampage in the city’s downtown area, the authorities said on Sunday evening.

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The Dayton police chief, Richard Biehl, told reporters that the shooting did not appear linked to a “bias motive”. The massacre took place within 13 hours of another mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that claimed 20 lives, injured at least two dozen more, and is being investigated by the federal authorities as a hate crime.

Law enforcement named the Dayton shooter as 24-year-old Connor Betts.

Earlier in the day the police department named all nine of the victims, which included the shooter’s 22-year-old younger sister, Megan Betts. The others were named as: 27-year-old Lois Oglesby, 38-year-old Saeed Saleh, 57-year-old Derrick Fudge, 30-year-old Logan Turner, 25-year-old Nicholas Cumer, 25-year-old Thomas McNichols, 36-year-old Beatrice Warren-Curtis, and 39-year-old Monica Brickhouse.

Early reports suggest there may have been red flags in the gunman’s history. Former high school classmates, speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said that Betts had been suspended from school over a “hit list” found scrawled in a school bathroom. The suspension followed an earlier disciplinary action after Betts came to school with a list of female students he wanted to sexually assault, according to the two classmates.

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The accounts emerged after police said there was nothing in the 24-year-old’s background that would have prevented him from purchasing the rifle with extended ammunition magazines.

Biehl indicated the shooter had bought both the firearm and the high-capacity, drum-style magazine legally.

Biehl said the shooter had fired “dozens” of rounds before he was shot outside a downtown bar in the Oregon district of the Ohio city.

Had the six officers involved in the response not acted so quickly, said chief Biehl, there would have been further “catastrophic injury and loss of life” due to the “level of weaponry” possessed by the shooter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A vigil held in Dayton, Ohio, following the attack. Photograph: Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images

Roy Kanpari, a 24-year-old merchandise salesman who witnessed the shooting and posted images to social media, told the Guardian in a phone interview he saw the shooter approach the Ned Peppers bar from an alleyway to the side. He said the shooter wore a black bandana mask across his face and said: “The McRib is back” before he opened fire.

“It was definitely chaotic,” Kanpari said. “I felt like I needed to get out of there … I needed to get out of the line of fire.”

Authorities said that the shooter had arrived in the downtown area in the same vehicle as his sister and another male friend, but the shooter had split from his sister at some point during the evening, before the shooting began.

The incident was still in the early stages of investigation and it was too early to assign a motive, according to chief Biehl.

At an earlier briefing the Republican senator from Ohio, Rob Portman, deflected questions about gun control in the wake of the shooting, and focussed on praising law enforcement’s response.

“This courage was extraordinary, and saved lives – probably hundreds of lives,” he said. “I’m impressed with how this community comes together and responds.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pairs of shoes belonging to victims piled behind the Ned Peppers bar. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP

Speaking to CNN after the Sunday evening briefing, the Democratic senator and 2020 presidential election candidate Amy Klobuchar, a moderate from Minnesota, joined calls to convene an emergency session of the US Senate.

She also called for a ban on sales of assault weapons.

She accused Donald Trump of talking “a good game for the cameras”, after the president said on Sunday “things are being done” but then, according to Klobuchar, “folding” to groups like the National Rifle Association.

Democrats in the House of Representatives passed a gun control act in February this year, which would create new background checks for gun transfers between unlicensed people.

The Senate majority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, has described the two mass shootings over the weekend as “horrifying acts of violence” but has indicated no sympathy for an emergency debate on the bill.