US President Barack Obama admitted that his failure to pass “commonsense gun safety laws” in the US is the greatest frustration of his presidency.
Obama told BBC it was “distressing” not to have made progress on the issue “even in the face of repeated mass killings,” BBC reported.
With just 18 months left in power, he said gun control was the area where he has been “most frustrated and most stymied” since coming to power in 2009.
He said his country was “the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient commonsense, gun-safety laws.”
Obama landed in Kenya on Friday for his first visit since becoming president. His comments came just hours before a gunman opened fire in a movie theater in the state of Louisiana, shooting dead two people before killing himself.
Police said the attacker was a 58-year-old white man armed with a handgun but did not release any further details.
Witnesses said the man opened fire about 20 minutes into the screening of a film at the Grand Theater in Lafayette.
Mass killing is becoming a growing concern in the US. In July 2012, a shooter opened fire during a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people. In December the same year, 20 children were killed in a horrific shooting in The Newtown, Connecticut.
More recently, nine African-American churchgoers were killed in South Carolina last month by a 21-year-old white supremacist.
