Obama to attend Fort Hood memorial

President Barack Obama will attend a memorial service on Wednesday for the victims of the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday.

"It's a terrible tragedy that happened in Fort Hood. The president and first lady send their thoughts and prayers out to the victims and families and everyone on the base, and are going to actually travel down on Wednesday to the memorial ceremony," Pfeiffer said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

Four soldiers, including the gunman, died in the shooting Wednesday and 16 were injured.

Pfeiffer dismissed a suggestion, offered earlier on the show by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas), that some soldiers ought to be armed on military bases.

"We need to have a discussion. We need to talk to the commanders about whether it would make sense to have some, not all, but maybe some of our senior leadership, officers, enlisted men, on the base, carry weapons for protection," McCaul said on the show. "I think ideally what you'd want to have are more military police officers, but in the current budget climate that's not as realistic, so it seems to me a force multiplier of officers and enlisted men that we can trust, the senior leadership, to have them carry."

Asked about that idea, Pfeiffer sought to dismiss it.

"No," Pfeiffer said, when asked whether the White House is weighing such a suggestion. "The Pentagon has looked at proposals like the one Congressman McCaul is talking about. They don't think it's a good idea."

The president was already slated to be in Texas for Democratic Senate and congressional campaign committee events in Houston on Wednesday, and to speak at a civil rights summit in Austin on Thursday, marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.