Barack Obama in Orlando: 'If we don't act, we'll be choosing to allow this to happen'

President Barack Obama visited grief-stricken Orlando on Thursday afternoon, meeting the relatives of victims and survivors from the country's worst-ever mass shooting and using the visit to call for greater gun control.

The president spent two hours inside the Amway Centre, a large stadium in the centre of town, to speak with victims' families and survivors.

“Today, once again, as has been true so many times before, I held and hugged grieving family members and parents," Mr Obama later told reporters.

"And they asked, ‘Why does this keep happening?’”

Among those he met were Patience Carter, the 20-year-old who was freed by Mateen because she was black and wrote a poem about "survivor's guilt", and Imran Yousef, the former Marine who saved 70 lives by quickly recognising what was happening.

Accompanied by Joe Biden, the vice president, Mr Obama said politicians need to "rise to the moment and pass gun control."

He has throughout his presidency called on Congress to toughen up restrictions and close loopholes in the law, including those that allow people on a terrorist watch list and no fly list to buy guns.

He also wants to see a reinstatement of a ban on assault rifles, like the one Omar Mateen used to murder 49 people inside the Pulse nightclub in the early hours of Sunday.

He described the gay club as a "sanctuary" for the community, which had been "violated" in a horrific manner.

Mateen is thought to have been gay and struggling to come to terms with it. He found solace in Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), pledging his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Isil leader, and claiming the attack was revenge for American bombing of Afghanistan, his ancestral home.

"The motives of this killer may have been different than the mass shooters in Aurora or Newtown," said Mr Obama, listing but two of the series of mass shootings that have marked his presidency. "But the instruments of death were so similar."

Mr Obama insisted that while the military would tackle Isil, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups in their hideouts and intelligence services would work to disrupt their networks, the government could not catch every "deranged person."

He continued: "But we can do something about the amount of damage that they do."

The Republican-controlled Congress has steadfastly refused to pass any gun legislation, saying to do so would infringe on gun owners constitutional rights.

"Unfortunately our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist or just a disturbed individual like those in Aurora and Newtown to buy extraordinarily powerful weapons and they can do so legally," said Mr Obama. 

Yet perhaps things could be slightly changing.

Donald Trump, the Republican presumptive nominee, said he would meet with the NRA to discuss preventing those on terrorist lists from obtaining weapons.

And in a rare symbolic show of bipartisanship, Marco Rubio, the one-time presidential hopeful and Republican senator, arrived on Air Force One with Mr Obama, to be greeted on the tarmac by Republican Florida governor Rick Scott.

After visiting the Amway Centre, the president and vice-president laid 49 roses at the Dr Phillips Arts Centre, scene of a candlelit vigil on Monday night.

“If we don't act, we will keep seeing more massacres like this, because we'll be choosing to allow this to happen," said Mr Obama.

"We’ll have said we don’t care enough to do something about it.”