“He gets emotional about one subject more than any other, gun violence.”
President Obama discusses the limits of presidential power and his efforts to push forward gun safety legislation. NBC News’ Lester Holt interviews the president for a Dateline NBC special: “The Reality of Hope.”
President Obama reveals his “biggest disappointment” as president in an interview with NBC News
In part four of the NBC News series “The Reality of Hope,” President Obama shared his biggest disappointment with Lester Holt: failing to push forward enough gun legislation.
The president spoke about presidential limits of power and how he struggled to get gun safety measures passed through an increasingly Republican-leaning Congress. Saying that, although the founding fathers were right to prevent one person from doing immense damage to the country, sometimes the system gets “stuck.”
“My worst day as president was hearing that twenty six-year-olds had been shot in the most brutal way, in their school where they should have been safe,” Obama recalled the Sandy Hook shootings, noting it was the first time he saw a Secret Service agent cry while on post. “I thought that, okay, this has to be a catalyst for some action by Congress. I didn’t expect that you’d see some huge movement on gun safety legislation, but I thought, ‘well, they’re going to have to make some effort.’ And the fact that it didn’t even get the kind of hearing and votes that you would have expected, that it didn’t generate a debate, that you actually had bipartisan legislation that had been sponsored, and it didn’t matter.”
Holt brought up President Obama’s 2013 speech in the Rose Garden after Congress had failed to expand background checks on gun sales, which the president called his “biggest disappointment.”
“The founders deliberately set up a system that separates powers,” Obama said. “There’s wisdom in that in the sense that the likelihood of any single person doing real damage to the country is reduced. On the other hand, basic civility and compromise breaks down, the system can get really stuck. And what we’ve witnessed over the last six years since I lost the majority in the Senate and the House is it’s been difficult, not impossible, but exceedingly difficult to try to move legislation even when we have strong support from the majority of the American people.”
VIDEO: President Obama reveals his “biggest disappointment” as president
sources: NBC, Youtube, rare.us
