STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now, for many people, Monday's mass shooting felt familiar, the latest in a string of mass shootings in the past year and a half.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We need rescue inside the auditorium - multiple victims.
INSKEEP: Twelve people were killed, 58 wounded in a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012. Brandon Axelrod was in the theater.
BRANDON AXELROD: It was right after the opening action scene. It was quiet and the canister of whatever going across the theater, and then the fizzing of it, and then the shooting.
INSKEEP: So that was in Colorado. Less than a month later, a gunman killed half a dozen people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
The most deadly shooting in the recent past was in Newtown, Connecticut last December. Twenty-six-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire in Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 first graders and six educators before committing suicide. That shooting prompted President Obama to support a change in gun laws.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Surely we can do better than this. If there's even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that's visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown, and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, and truly we have an obligation to try.
MONTAGNE: Some states did update their gun regulations, though Congress has yet to agree on changes.
INSKEEP: After Monday's shooting, the president ordered flags to fly at half staff at the White House and all military facilities for the rest of this week.
MONTAGNE: The Navy Yard attack was the 20th mass shooting since President Obama took office in 2009. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.