    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [July 8, 1996]
    [Pages 1082-1084]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative
    July 8, 1996

        Thank you very much. Joseph and Tina Chery, your son must have been
    a remarkable young man to inspire such devotion and vision, and we thank
    you. We thank you for your work, and we thank you for your courage and
    heart in being here today. And we thank you, too, ma'am. Thank you very
    much.
        Mr. Vice President, Secretary Rubin, Attorney General Reno, Under
    Secretary Kelly, thank you all for your good work. Senator Robb, thank
    you for being here today, sir, and for your leadership.
        I thank the police chiefs, the prosecutors, the public officials
    from all across America who are here today, who know better than anyone
    that we will never be able to protect our children from violence or take
    our streets back for them and away from guns and drugs and gangs unless
    we all work together, as Mr. Chery said.
        In the State of the Union Address, I challenged our Nation to focus
    on this issue of youth violence. It is a supreme irony that we are
    living in an age of greater possibility for young people to live out
    their dreams than at any point in our history, but we are moving into
    the 21st century with youth violence on the rise, with too many of our
    children killing children, and too many others raising themselves on the
    street, and too many others simply vulnerable because they're going
    about their lives and they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong
    time because we permitted those wrong places to develop and we permit
    them to continue to exist.
        I'll never forget the young man I met in Long Beach, California, who
    was in a junior high

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    school. He told me that his school had developed a school uniform policy
    because of the gangs in his neighborhood. And they figured if they all
    wore green clothes to school every day, nobody would shoot them. And he
    said it was the first time in 3 years he'd gotten to walk to and from
    school without having to look over his shoulder.
        There is no future for these young people unless we move to take it
    back for them. As the Vice President said, we have worked very hard with
    many of you and others to place a comprehensive strategy to take back
    our streets from guns and gangs and violence and drugs. Many of you have
    been a part of it; we thank you for that. And the strategy is beginning
    to work. We believe this will be the 4th year in a row when the crime
    rate will go down.
        But we all know there is still way too much crime in America, and we
    know that while crime is going down in the country as a whole, youth
    violence is going up. While drug use has been going down and cocaine use
    has dropped dramatically, casual drug use by young people is going up.
    So we have to do more to focus our strategy on youth violence. That's
    why we strengthened the safe and drug-free school law, why we instituted
    a policy of zero tolerance for guns in schools, why we're now
    encouraging communities more strongly than ever to enforce their truancy
    laws and to take steps ranging from school uniforms to community
    curfews.
        The drug strategy announced this spring by General McCaffrey focuses
    on young people. We are mounting a nationwide crackdown on gangs. And
    this spring I sent to the Congress legislation to make it easier to
    prosecute gangs. This January in the State of the Union Address, I said
    that if a teenager commits a crime as an adult, he should be prosecuted
    as an adult, and that is a proposition that is gaining wider and wider
    agreement.
        But as we take on this problem of youth violence, if we're serious
    about it we cannot avoid dealing with one of its most terrifying
    elements, teens with guns. This is an amazing fact; listen to this. The
    number of teenagers committing crimes without guns is the same today as
    it was in the 1970's, two decades ago. Let me say that again. The number
    of teenagers in the United States today committing crimes without guns
    is the same today as it was 20 years ago. The number of homicides by
    teens who have guns has tripled.
        Today, if a gang member is caught committing a crime with a smoking
    gun in his hand, often as not, the gun is simply put in a police locker
    with little further investigation. Yet we know that gangs often buy in
    bulk from a single, shadowy supplier, a criminal network that channels
    an arsenal of weapons to young criminals or would-be criminals.
        We need a national campaign to cut off the flow of guns to teens who
    commit crimes. Today I am directing the Department of the Treasury and
    the Department of Justice to work with local law enforcement in a new
    nationwide initiative. In the 17 cities already mentioned, we will, for
    the first time, see that every time a gun is used in a crime and seized
    by law enforcement, it will be tracked through a national tracing system
    to find out where it came from. We will use that information to target
    those criminal gunrunning networks that are peddling guns to our
    teenagers.
        Local and national prosecutors have agreed to work together to break
    up these criminal gangs. And the new data from these 17 cities will give
    us a much better idea of how the black market in guns actually operates
    and how to break it. Police on the beat, prosecutors in the courtroom,
    Federal investigators in the crime lab, they'll all work together in a
    genuine national team to take on the gunrunners.
        Those who illegally peddle guns to our children will get a simple
    message: We will find you, we will prosecute you, and we will punish
    you. We owe that much to fine families like the Cherys, to the children
    they lost and the children they still have, to give to this world and to
    our future.
        We have to give the future back to all of our children. We cannot
    permit the United States to go into the 21st century the richest, the
    most powerful country in the world, with more opportunities available to
    more young people to live out their dreams than ever before, and keep
    allowing our young people to die before their dreams ever have a chance
    to take shape.
        I thank the law enforcement personnel who are here and those who
    stand with you all across America. I thank the members of the
    administration who have worked on this. Most important, I thank the
    Cherys and all the families who have known the most unimaginable loss
    any human beings can know for having the cour-

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    age to stand with us and demand that we do better.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:45 p.m. in the East Room at the White
    House. In his remarks, he referred to Joseph and Tina Chery, whose son
    was killed in a gang crossfire in 1993, and Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, USA
    (Ret.), Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy.