VOA常速英語：彭斯與德州教堂屠殺受害者見面

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FORT HOUSTON, TEXAS — Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, are heading to the small Texas town of Sutherland Springs to console the wounded survivors and families of the victims of the nation's latest mass murder.

Pence was to speak Wednesday at a prayer vigil for the 26 churchgoers shot dead during a Sunday morning service by a gunman with a history of mental health issues. He was also to meet with law enforcement officials and the church neighbor who shot the gunman as he fled, potentially saving other lives.

Before going to Sutherland Springs, Pence comforted 10 of the critically wounded survivors being treated at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.

The killings have again raised questions about the need for stricter gun laws in a state with a large gun-owning population.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that stricter laws would not have stopped the gunman, and possibly would have kept the church neighbor from confronting the shooter.

During a stop in South Korea, Trump said if there were increased vetting of gun buyers in the United States, "you might not have had that very brave person who happened to have a gun or a rifle in his truck go out and shoot him, and hit him and neutralize him."

Asked whether he was considering any new gun control policies in the aftermath of the second major mass killing in the U.S. in five weeks, Trump said, "I mean, you look at the city with the strongest gun laws in our nation, is Chicago, and Chicago is a disaster. It's a total disaster."

The U.S. Air Force is investigating why the 2012 domestic violence conviction of the shooter, Devin Kelley, 26, was not properly entered into the Federal Bureau of Investigation's database as required by federal law. Authorities say that measure should have stopped him from legally buying the rifle he used in the massacre.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis sent a memo to the Pentagon's acting inspector general to "investigate whether appropriate information" regarding Kelley should have been transmitted to the FBI for entry into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, "whether such information was not transmitted, and if it was not transmitted, why it was not."

The former airman had previously been court-martialed for beating his wife and stepson, convicted, sentenced to 12 months in prison, discharged from the military for bad conduct and handed a reduction in rank.

Police report that in 2012, Kelley escaped from a psychiatric hospital in New Mexico, where he was confined after making threats against commanders and sneaking guns onto an Air Force base. Police later picked him up in neighboring Texas.

The FBI agent leading the probe into the mass shooting, Christopher Combs, said the killer's cellphone has been sent to an FBI laboratory for examination, but that so far, because of encryption, investigators have been unable to crack it open to determine whether he had made contact with anyone else about the shooting or left any trail of information that he was about to launch the attack.

Investigators explained why they thought a domestic dispute might have been behind the killings. The gunman had sent "threatening texts" to his mother-in-law before the shooting, investigators said, but she was not at Sunday's service.

"This was not racially motivated ... wasn't over religious beliefs. There was a domestic situation going on within the family and in-laws," Texas public safety official Freeman Martin said.