Obama: Lack of Gun Control Laws "Frustrating"
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I could have been shot. Like I didn't know where the shooter was. I don't know where he could have been. I don't know if you could have gone into. Our theater and shoot us. And I was just so afraid.</s>COSTELLO: President Obama is on his way to Nairobi, Kenya right now addressing security issues across the region. But once again he's faced with security issues here at home. The president has been briefed on last night's deadly shooting and in a cruel twist the tragedy just comes hours after he called a lack of commonsense gun laws that, quote, "most frustrating part of his presidency." Michelle Kosinski live in Kenya with more for us. Hi, Michelle.</s>MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Carol. Right. You know, Kenyans were kind of upset over the last couple days with the world talking about potential security concerns of the president traveling here. Well, now people here are marveling that what the president is being briefed on right now is the security concerns of regular people in public places in America. I mean, you look at over the last couple of years that shootings have happened in malls, theaters, kindergarten schools, you name it. It is a problem. And what to do about that problem is the debate right now. President Obama expressed his frustration over trying to do more to prevent these things in an interview with the BBC last night. And interestingly as you mentioned this happened only hours before a shooting happened yet again. Listen.</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The one area I feel that I've been most frustrated and most stymied, it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient commonsense gun safety laws. Even in the face of repeated mass killings. And 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.</s>KOSINSKI: So, in that interview, he also said that he wasn't going to be stopped from trying to do more. So that would have to be in the form of an executive order. How far that would go remains to be scene. The White House hasn't been giving much in the way of detail on what they want to do on this issue and when it could happen. When you look at 2013, for example, after the Newtown shooting at the school, in Sandy Hook, the president enacted nearly two dozen executive orders on gun control but they were fairly weak. I mean, they did things like try to share information among agencies, put limits on background checks. But a lot of these were stymied by legislation. That kind of had them going nowhere. When you look at Congress's attempts to limit the president, it's pretty tough. Most recently, they put in a rider to an appropriations bill for the Department of Justice that would limit the president's attempts to try to stop ammunition from being sold in certain quantities. Things like that. I think most interestingly, one thing the president tried to do in his last round of executive orders was to allow the CDC to do studies on gun violence, just studies. But the CDC hasn't wanted to do that out of fears that if they studied gun violence in America, that Congress would try to cut certain funding. So, that's the kind of impasse that the president faces and to say that this would be an uphill battle to try to change things, Carol, is putting it very, very lightly.</s>COSTELLO: Well, it's a sad world when you can't even do a study without fear of repercussion. That's ridiculous. Michelle Kosinski, I know you can't comment. I'm sorry to lay that on you. But I just had to say it. Michelle Kosinski reporting live from Kenya this morning. I appreciate it. All right. We just got cell phone video in from inside the theater. This was taken by somebody who went to the movie last night in Lafayette. You can see that they are attending to an injured person on the ground. I'm seeing this for the first time along with you. They are trying to carry that person to get some sort of help. You can hear the emergency vehicles arriving in the background. We assume they are hearing that person to a vehicle that might be able to take them to the hospital. Nine people originally taken to the hospital, one of them in critical condition. The parish president just told me that two of those injured have been released from the hospital. That's good news. But everybody says the psychological scars will live on forever. Later this hour, we're going to check in with the Lafayette Police Chief Jim Kraft. He'll tell us more about the shooter, this 59-year- old drifter, that just opened fire for no apparent reason in this movie theater. I'll be right back.