of my Presidency!


At an event marking the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, former President Barack Obama reflected on what he still considers the worst day he spent in office.

“I consider Dec. 14, 2012, the single darkest day of my presidency,” Obama said Tuesday night at the Sandy Hook Promise “10-Year Remembrance” benefit.

“Like so many other people I felt not just sorrow but I felt angry, fury in a world that could allow such a thing.”Twenty-six people — including 20 children, all of them 6 or 7 years old — were killed in the massacre in Newtown, Conn., that day.

It remains one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.Two days after the killings, Obama traveled to Newtown to meet with the families of the victims and address the community, which he has said was equally tough.

(“It’s the only time I ever saw Secret Service cry,” he said in 2017, shortly before leaving office.) Obama said that what followed was “perhaps the most bitter disappointment” of his presidency.“The closest I came to being cynical was the utter failure of Congress to respond in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings,” he said Tuesday.

“To see almost the entire GOP, but also a decent number of Democrats, equivocate and hem and haw and filibuster and ultimately bend yet again to pressure from the gun lobby.“I would not have blamed the Sandy Hook families for giving up after that,” Obama continued.

“I wouldn’t blame them for falling into cynicism and disgust and despair.”Obama commended Sandy Hook Promise co-founders Mark Barden (whose 7-year-old son, Daniel, was among the children killed at the school) and Nicole Hockley (whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was among those slain) for their perseverance.

“Mark and Nicole told me then that they would not give up — that ending gun violence would be their life’s work,” Obama said.