Congregants pray during a prayer vigil for the nine victims killed at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 19, 2015 in Washington, DC.(Agence Prance-Presse)
Hollywood action star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today urged all US politicians to tackle the problems exposed by the shooting massacre in a mainly black church in the American city of Charleston, South Carolina.
"When it comes to an issue like that, when someone goes into a church and kills people - it has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat or centre or right or left or anything, it has to do with people," Schwarzenegger told reporters in Paris in a media conference promoting his new film, "Terminator Genisys".
"It is a big mistake to put a party line on front of someone's decision, because that's a big problem we have worldwide, being partisan," he said in response to an AFP journalist's question about the Charleston bloodbath.
The 67-year-old actor, who was the Republican governor of California from 2003 to 2011, urged American politicians to "pay close attention" to violent societal issues, including mental illness and US military veteran suicides.
"There's a lot of issues that need to be addressed that can only be addressed successfully if both parties work together, if all parties work together, that's the key thing," he said.
Nine churchgoers were killed on Wednesday as they were attending a Bible study meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of America's oldest black churches.
Among the victims was the church's pastor, 41-year-old Clementa Pinckney, who also was a Democratic state senator known to US President Barack Obama.
Police have arrested a 21-year-old white suspect, a high school dropout named Dylann Roof, whose Facebook page featured photos of him wearing the flags of the defunct white supremacist regimes of apartheid-era South Africa and former white minority-ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Several commentators, politicians and US media said the slaughter exposed the persistent problems of racism and gun violence in the United States.
"At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries," Obama said on Thursday.