Trump told reporters he believed stricter reviews of gun purchases would not have stopped Sunday's massacre at a press conference in South Korea.
Gunman Devin Kelley was wounded by a resident of the community of about 400 people who heard the gunshot when he killed 26 and wounded a further 20.
The local citizen grabbed his rifle and raced to the church, shooting the 26-year-old twice as he fled.
The massacre stirred an ongoing debate over gun ownership, which is protected by the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Guns are part of the fabric of life in rural areas.
Trump told reporters stricter reviews of gun purchases would not have stopped the massacre.
"There would have been no difference," Trump said.
He added that stricter gun laws might have prevented the man who shot Kelley from acting as he did. "You would have had hundreds more dead."
Meanwhile, the FBI has the cellphone of the man who killed 26 people at a Texas church but has not been able to access the device so far, officials said Tuesday.
Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Christopher Combs said the phone has been sent to FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, and expressed confidence the bureau would eventually get into the device.
"They're in the process of looking at the phone," Combs told reporters. "At this point in time we are unable to get into that phone.
"I can assure you we're working very hard to get into the phone and that will continue until we find an answer," Combs said. "I don't know how long that's going to be to be quite honest with you.
"It could be tomorrow, a week or a month. We don't know yet."
Combs pointed out without naming specific cases that increased encryption and password protection on phones has posed difficulties for the FBI in the past.
The most notable case involved the iPhone of the man behind the December 2015 attack in San Bernardino, California, where the FBI took Apple to court to compel it to grant access to the device.
The FBI finally managed to get into the iPhone through other means.
"Law enforcement, whether it's at the state, local or federal level, is increasingly not able to get into these phones," Combs said.
"I'm not going to describe what phone it is because I don't want to tell every bad guy out there what phone to buy to harass our efforts on trying to find justice here," he added.
FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke of the problem in a speech last month.
"We face a huge and increasing number of cases that rely on electronic evidence," Wray said. "We also face a situation where we are increasingly unable to access that evidence despite lawful authority to do so.
He said that over an 11-month period, the FBI had been unable to access the content of over 6,900 mobile devices "even though we had the legal authority to do so."
"That's more than half of all the mobile devices we attempted to access in that timeframe," he said. "And that's just at the FBI."
"That’s a huge, huge problem," he said. "It impacts investigations across the board -- narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime, and child exploitation."
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