Shocked. Saddened. But not surprised.

This is how I feel when I see the news this morning of yet another shooting in the USA. This time in a cinema.

A cinema? A church? An office? Schools? Colleges? Is there nowhere that someone who lawfully has the right to own the means to murder others at will cannot threaten innocent people going about their daily lives?

And for the first time, this: a president, the president of the United States speaks openly and candidly about his own frustrations in the face of these “repeated mass killings.”

The one area in which he said he has felt he has been “most frustrated, most stymied” has been his failure to pass “sufficient common sense gun safety laws” in the one “advanced nation on earth” in which laws like this are absent.

Just hours after the exclusive interview with the BBC, the Louisiana gunman opened fire.

The BBC journalist who interviewed him said live on the BBC this morning that it was rare to get such a candid answer from a politician. I am grateful for the president’s honesty and his open show of frustration here because as he says,

“If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands.”

Surely something has got to change? President Obama vowed to keep trying.

Watch the full interview in which he speaks “bluntly” about a range of other global issues here:

Relephant: 

Best Gun Control Advertisement Ever.

Author: Khara-Jade Warren

Image: Screenshot from BBC video