Obama: ‘Pretty shameful day for Washington’

A visibly infuriated President Barack Obama surrounded himself with tear-stained parents of Connecticut school shooting victims and declared it a “pretty shameful day for Washington” after the Senate rejected a measure designed to make it tougher for criminals to get their hands on guns.

The Senate, which is controlled by the president’s own party, handed him a stinging first defeat for his second term by voting down a bipartisan compromise to expand background checks for gun buyers. The disappointment was all over the faces of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, their mouths turned into deep frowns as they appeared in the Rose Garden shortly after the vote.

“The fact is most of these senators could not offer any good reason why we wouldn’t want to make it harder for criminals and those with severe mental illness to buy a gun,” Obama said. “There were no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this.”