Obama: No evidence Orlando shooter part of larger plot

There is no evidence to suggest that the terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, is part of a larger terrorist plot, President Barack Obama said Monday.

Speaking to reporters after a briefing with national security officials, Obama said it appears that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was inspired by extremist information on the Internet and represents an incident of homegrown extremism.


“It’s important to emphasize that we’re still at the preliminary stages of the investigation, and there’s a lot more we have to learn," Obama said. "The one thing that we can say is that this is being treated as a terrorist investigation. It appears that the shooter was inspired by various extremist information that was disseminated over the Internet. All of those materials are currently being searched, exploited, so that we will have a better idea of the pathway that the killer took in making a decision to launch this attack.”

As there is no current evidence to suggest that Mateen was directed externally by ISIL, Obama said the situation "appears to be similar to what we saw in San Bernardino."

"As far as we can tell right now, this is certainly an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been so concerned about for a very long time," Obama said. "It also appears that he was able to obtain these weapons legally because he did not have a criminal record that in some ways would prohibit him from purchasing these weapons.”

In targeting the Islamic State, Obama said the U.S. must increasingly counter extremist ideology in the homeland just as it disrupts more extensive terrorist plots engineered from overseas.

"We are also going to have to make sure that we think about the risks we are willing to take about being so lax in how we make very powerful firearms available to people in this country," Obama remarked.

The discussion about gun control and terrorism, he said, is not an "either/or" but rather a "both/and," Obama said.

"We have to go after these terrorist organizations and hit them hard. We have to counter extremism," Obama went on to say. "But we also have to make sure that it is not easy for somebody who decides they want to harm someone in this country to be able to obtain weapons to get at them. And my hope is that over the next days and weeks that we are being sober about how we approach this problem that we let the facts get determined by our investigators, but we also do some reflection on how we can best tackle what is going to be a very challenging problem, not just here in this country but around the world."

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were briefed on the latest on the investigation by FBI Director James Comey, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

The deadliest mass shooting in American history killed 49 people and wounded another 53 and is also the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil since the 9/11 attacks.