WASHINGTON – President Trump on Sunday called the Texas shooter “a very sick person” but suggested that background checks wouldn’t have stopped the most recent massacre that left seven people dead and more than 20 wounded.

“Background checks – I will say that for the most part, sadly, if you look at the last four or five, going back even five or six or seven years — for the most part, as strong as you make your background checks, they would not have stopped any of it,” the president told reporters as he returned to the White House from Camp David.

“So it’s a big problem. It’s a mental problem. It’s a big problem,” he continued.

The president, who later attended a hurricane briefing at Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters Sunday afternoon, briefly talked about gun control measures.

“It’s tragic. But they did an incredible job under the circumstances. Another very sick person. So I just want to thank everybody involved. And always, you say, as bad as it was, it could have been worse. But it was certainly bad. A very, very sad situation,” the president said.

He said he and Congress are “looking at the same things.”

“There’s a big package of things that’s going to be put before [Congress], by a lot of different people. We have a lot of groups working on it. … This really hasn’t changed anything,” he said.

The president said work on a bill was happening “irrespective of what happened yesterday in Texas.”

At the top of the FEMA briefing, Trump said his administration was “committed to working with Congress to stop the menace of mass attacks.”

“This includes strong measures to keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous and deranged individuals and substantial reforms to the nation’s broken mental health system. Our goal must be to identify severely disturbed individuals and disrupt their plans before they strike,” Trump explained. “To reduce violence, we must also ensure that criminals with guns are put behind bars and kept off the streets. Public safety is our number one priority, always wanting to protect our Second Amendment.”

The president has shown various levels of support for universal background check legislation in the weeks following double shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas.

On Saturday, a still-unnamed male shooter killed seven in a drive-by rampage in Odessa and Midland, Texas.

“Congress has a lot of thinking to do,” Trump said.