    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [August 26, 1996]
    [Pages 1355-1360]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks in Columbus, Ohio
    August 26, 1996

        The President. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm glad to see all of
    you. I thank you for that wonderful introduction. I am delighted to be
    here. Thank you, Chief Jackson, for being

    [[Page 1356]]

    here and for the work you do every day. Thank you, Sheriff Karnes, for
    being here, for what you do as well. And I'm very grateful to you.
        Thank you, Senator Glenn----

    [At this point, there was a disturbance in the audience.]

        The President. Wait, wait, wait. No, wait a minute. Okay, wait,
    wait, wait. I believe in the first amendment. Now you've had your say,
    may I have mine? [Applause] Thank you, thank you very much. We'll talk
    about the record now.

    [The disturbance continued.]

        The President. You've got to feel sorry for these people. They don't
    want you to know my record; that's why they have to shout. They'd be in
    a world of hurt if the American people--[applause]--you know, if the
    American people find out the truth. They don't have a chance, and they
    have to try to shout it down. I don't blame them. You got to feel sorry
    for--[applause].
        Now, let me say I am delighted to be joined here with Senator John
    Glenn. He talked about how we'd reduced the Government. He didn't say
    that he deserves a lot of the credit for it. Our friends on the other
    side talked a lot--like today, you see, they're good at that--they
    talked a lot about the Government and how it was too big and how
    terrible it was, you know. But it just got bigger. They didn't do
    anything about it.
        We reduced the size of it. You have the smallest Federal Government
    since John Kennedy was President. You have the smallest Federal
    Government as a percentage of our work force since Franklin Roosevelt
    took the oath of office in 1933, before the New Deal.
        But the reason you haven't heard about it is we didn't throw those
    people in the street. Of the 250,000 people smaller the Federal
    Government is, fewer than 1,800 were involuntarily separated. I'm proud
    of that. We treated those people with dignity and helped them to go on
    to other lives and said, thank you for what you did for your country.
        And you haven't heard about it because we continue to do the good
    work of America, because we have a strong and effective Government. We
    don't have a weak Government; it's just leaner and more effective. And
    that's a big part--in big part the result of the efforts and the
    leadership of John Glenn, who saved hundreds of millions of dollars in
    defense procurement and did so many other things for this country that
    he will never get adequate credit for. But the people of Ohio should
    know what he has done.
        I also want to thank a daughter of Ohio, your State treasurer who's
    now my national Treasurer, Mary Ellen Withrow, who's here with me today.
    I thank her. I thank my friend Gene Branstool. I think he's back here
    with us today. I went to his farm, as John Glenn said, and Gene came and
    served with us in the Department of Agriculture until he decided, like
    any sane person, that he'd rather live in Ohio than Washington, DC.
    [Laughter] I've got my Ohio buckeye that I got in Chillicothe last
    night. When I was on the train yesterday, I noticed the corn crop, and
    it looks really pretty. But I told Gene, I said, ``It's not as high as
    it was in 1992.'' He said, ``I know, but the prices are a lot higher,
    and that's even better.'' [Laughter]
        So I am delighted to be here with you. I thank Senator Jeff
    Johnson--State Senator Jeff Johnson--and Franklin County Democratic
    chair Dennis White for being here and all of you for coming out today. I
    want to say a special thanks to the students of the police academy and
    the men and women who graduated from it and the law enforcement
    officials who are here today. They are here today so that we can express
    our gratitude to them.
        One of the proudest moments of my Presidency was to stand with
    America's police officers and sign, after 7 years of long, hard
    struggle, the Brady bill. I never thought of public safety as a
    political issue before. I never thought of it as a Republican issue,
    when they said they were tough on crime, because I'd been working on it
    for 20 years. It never occurred to me that--when a person gets mugged,
    they don't ask if you're a Democrat or a Republican. I thought it was an
    American issue. And then when we were fighting to pass the Brady bill, I
    never thought of it as a political issue, even though the NRA had more
    influence over the other party. There's lots of NRA members in my home
    State, and half the folks have a hunting or a fishing license or both.
    But tonight I'm proud to say that the Brady bill, which was named after
    Ronald Reagan's Press Secretary, Jim Brady, and was pushed by his wife,
    Sarah Brady--I'm proud to say that at the Democratic Convention in
    Chicago tonight

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    Sarah Brady will be one of the speakers. It's an American issue to stand
    up for public safety.
        You know, we are living in an age of enormous possibility. You read
    about it all the time; the technological changes are staggering. The
    children in this audience, a lot of them--a lot of the young people 10
    years from now will be doing jobs that have not even been invented yet,
    jobs that have not even been imagined yet. The pace of change is
    staggering. And I've been doing everything I could to make sure that we
    are ready for the 21st century. It starts in just 4 years. I'm taking a
    train through the heartland of America because I want to see people like
    you that I've been fighting for and because I want people like you to
    know that that train is on the right track to the 21st century.
        We spent a lot of time talking about opportunity, and last week was
    a good week for opportunity. We raised the minimum wage for 10 million
    people, 440,000 in Ohio. We made it easier for small-business people and
    their employees to take out and keep their pension plans, even when they
    change jobs, and that's very important. We made it easier for families
    to adopt children, even across racial lines, and gave them a tax credit
    to do it, and that's very important. We passed the welfare reform law,
    but we kept guaranteed health care and child care for working women and
    children, so that when we give people a job they can also take care of
    their kids. That's what we want for middle class families; it's what we
    should want for poor families as well.
        We signed the Kennedy-Kassebaum health care reform bill to protect
    25 million people, to give them a chance to keep their health insurance
    when they changed jobs and to say you can't be denied health insurance
    just because somebody in your family gets sick. That's what insurance is
    for, people are going to get sick. It was a great thing.
        Senator Glenn talked about the deficit. Actually, Senator, the last
    time a President had the deficit go down in all 4 years of his
    Presidency was before the Civil War, in the 1840's, under John Tyler.
    It's been a long time since we did that. That's the good news. The bad
    news is John Tyler was not reelected. [Laughter] But what you ought to
    know while you're having that laugh is--this is the important thing, not
    how long ago it was--what you really ought to know is, when you consider
    the major issues in this election, is that your budget would not only be
    balanced, there would be a healthy surplus in the Federal budget today
    if it weren't for the interest we have to pay on the debt that was run
    up in just the 12 years before I took office. And you all remember what
    that debt meant and what that interest meant. It meant high interest
    costs, low investment, slow job growth, nobody getting a raise,
    homeownership declining because mortgage rates were so high.
        We cannot afford to blow a hole in this deficit again. We can have a
    tax cut that's targeted to childrearing, to education, to training of
    adults, to helping us grow the economy and helping give some income
    relief to middle class people. But we dare not take one we can't afford,
    and we don't need to go to the bank and borrow the money. We need to go
    on and balance this budget, keep the interest rates down, keep
    homeownership going up, keep business investment going up, keep new jobs
    going up, keep wages rising. That's what we've got to do.
        But this whole agenda--when you talk about the opportunity agenda in
    America, you can get a lot of applause lines, because we've created a
    lot of opportunity. But America doesn't work without the other half of
    the bargain, responsibility. Without responsibility, opportunity will
    not flourish. And unless we are committed to that basic bargain and to
    the proposition that we have to go forward together across racial lines,
    across religious lines, across all the lines that divide us--we need to
    say, as long as we all believe in the Declaration of Independence, the
    Constitution, the Bill of Rights, we show up for work every day, we're
    going arm in arm into the future. We're going to be one community in
    America and going arm in arm into the future.
        Four years ago, I really believed after talking to Americans all
    over this country that the biggest threat to that and the biggest
    affront to our sense of responsibility was the rising rate of crime and
    violence all over America. We put into place a tough strategy based on
    what was working already at the grassroots level to try to reduce the
    crime rate, focusing on police, on punishment, on prevention, 100,000
    more police on the street, ``three strikes and you're out,'' the assault
    weapons ban, the Brady bill, recreational programs for children after
    school, keeping the schools open more, helping communities to do that,
    putting those D.A.R.E. officers

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    in, having a zero-tolerance policy for guns, doing things that would
    work to help our kids have something to say yes to, not just to say no
    to. All these things are making a difference.
        For 2 years I've been telling America we were having a terrible
    dilemma: the crime rate was going down, but the juvenile crime rate was
    going up; the drug use rate was going down, but the juvenile drug use
    rate was going up. Now, we know for 2 years the juvenile murder rate has
    dropped dramatically, and last year for the first time in a long time,
    the juvenile crime rate started to go down. I can only hope that means
    that we can get the juvenile drug use rate down, too. We have to keep
    working on that. But the last thing we want to do is to take those
    D.A.R.E. officers out of the school. We ought to do more to provide safe
    and drug-free schools, not less.
        What I'd like to talk about today is where we're going from here. I
    spent a lot of time trying to help schools all over America do things
    that would save more kids, to do things like have the option to adopt
    school uniform policies. I've seen it all over California, where it's
    become the rage, where you've got lower dropout rates, less violence,
    higher performance, all the kids feel better, not just the poor kids,
    the middle class kids, but the wealthy kids, too. People like being
    judged by what's on the inside, not what on the outside. It's helping to
    promote discipline and values in our schools. Tougher truancy laws are
    doing the same thing; curfew laws are doing the same thing. We ought to
    be doing more of that.
        We also, as the sheriff and the chief said, did take on the gun
    issue, and a lot of people thought we had lost our minds. And I'll tell
    you, we did lose a lot of good Congressmen over it. Back in 1994, I
    remember the other side going around telling everybody in places like
    Ohio and Arkansas that the Democrats and the President had voted to take
    your guns away. I didn't know a single deer hunter with an Uzi, not a
    one. [Laughter] I've been duck hunting since I was a very young fellow,
    and it wouldn't have bothered me a lick to wait a few days on the Brady
    bill to have my record checked. I just didn't understand it. But they
    scared a lot of people. You may know a lot of people they scared. And a
    lot of people, a lot of good people, a lot of good people gave up their
    seats in Congress so these people could be safer when they go out to
    defend you and so you could be safer.
        So I hope over the next 70 days or so, you'll talk to your friends
    and neighbors who felt that way and remind them next time hunting season
    goes out, unless they decided not to, they're still carrying the same
    weapon they had in 1994. But there are 60,000 felons, fugitives, and
    stalkers who don't have handguns because of the Brady bill, and we're
    better off because of it.
        Now, I want to say briefly today where I think we ought to go from
    here as Americans. And again, I hope they won't be partisan issues. The
    Brady bill has plainly worked. It has not imposed undue inconvenience on
    anybody. It has made our law enforcement officials safer. And it has
    made our citizens safer. It covers today anyone convicted of a felony.
        The problem is there is one class of misdemeanors that tend to be
    particularly violent, where we know there's a potential for future
    violence, where often there's a plea bargain which goes from a felony to
    a misdemeanor. And that is the painful area of domestic violence. I
    believe that the Brady bill should cover anybody with a domestic
    violence conviction. I don't believe they should be able to buy a
    handgun. Under the current law, thousands of people who are wife beaters
    or child abusers, even those who have wielded weapons in their assault
    but were convicted of misdemeanors, can still buy handguns with
    potentially deadly consequences.
        I believe strongly in the right of Americans to own guns. I have
    used them as a hunter with great joy. But make no mistake, those who
    threaten the safety of others do not deserve our trust. If you're
    convicted of a felony, you shouldn't have one. If you're a fugitive from
    the law, you shouldn't have a gun. If you're stalking or harassing women
    or children, you shouldn't have a gun. And if you commit an act of
    violence against your spouse or your child, you shouldn't have a gun.
        Let me also say, domestic violence is a big threat to law
    enforcement officers. We're working hard with our new violence against
    women section and other efforts in the Justice Department to help police
    officers and prosecutors and judges to understand domestic violence, to
    recognize it when they see it, to know how to deal with it.
        This past February, we launched a 24-hour, 7-day, toll-free hotline
    so women in trouble can

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    find out about emergency help, get shelter, report abuse to the
    authorities. I never miss a chance to give out the number. It's 1-800-
    799-SAFE. And about 7,000 people a month call on that hotline. Extending
    the Brady bill to victims of domestic violence, to protect them, will
    save more lives. It will also save more law enforcement lives.
        There are other steps we should take to protect our police officers
    and our citizens from gun violence. Last summer I sent Congress
    legislation to ban cop-killer bullets. These bullets are designed to
    kill police. That's what they do. They're designed to pierce bulletproof
    vests. If a bullet can slice through a bulletproof vest like a hot knife
    through butter, it should be against the law. Every major law
    enforcement official organization supports this bill, and it's time for
    Congress to support it, too.
        I want a bill to give prosecutors the power to impose tougher
    sentences on drug traffickers and gang members who also use a gun when
    they commit their crimes. We used to have a bill which did that, and the
    courts said, unless they were using the gun--even if they were carrying
    the gun in full view--they couldn't get extra penalties. That's wrong.
    That's wrong. We need to provide protection against people who are
    peddling drugs or doing other things with a gun designed to terrify
    people. We need to say, ``If you do that, we're going to punish you more
    harshly.''
        Again, I want Congress to pass the bill I sent them nearly a year
    ago to ban guns anywhere near our schools. That is wrong. We used to
    have a bill on that, too, and the courts overturned it. So I sent them a
    bill to fix it, and it still hasn't passed. We don't need people
    wandering around a block from a schoolyard with a gun. We know there are
    too many kids who've been killed on play yards with guns in this
    country, and we do not need it.
        Now, again, there are people who are against banning cop-killer
    bullets. They say it's just a slippery slope eroding their right to keep
    and bear arms. I have never seen a deer in a Kevlar vest--[laughter]--
    never. If somebody can show me a picture of one out there hiding from
    our hunters, I'll be glad to reassess my position. [Laughter] But until
    they do, I believe I'll stay with these folks here. I think they're
    entitled to be safe.
        And let me just make one final comment. Usually when people like me
    give speeches like this, we try, and sometimes we're fortunate enough to
    succeed, to have folks like this behind us, people in uniform, because
    we honor them, we're proud of them, we identify with them, and we're
    glad they're doing something we don't do and taking a risk for us. But I
    think we should never forget that the ultimate beneficiaries of all
    these efforts to make our streets safer and our schools safer and our
    homes safer are you. And I want to introduce you to the two people on
    the stage that I haven't introduced yet. And I want to tell you a story.
    It's one of the most moving stories of my over 20 years in public life.
        This man and his son--this is Dimitrious Theofanis and his son,
    Nick. I'd like to ask them to stand up. [Applause] I want to tell you
    how I met Dimitrious. In early 1992,\1\ about 4\1/2\ years ago, just
    before the New Hampshire primary, I had a fundraiser scheduled in a big
    hotel in New York. And frankly, I was having a tough time. I was
    dropping in the polls, and all the press had said I was dead and over,
    history, finished. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. All I was
    thinking about was my politics. I'm ashamed to say it, but that's all I
    was thinking about.
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        \1\ White House correction.
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        And I was walking through this kitchen thinking there wasn't even
    going to be anybody at the fundraiser because everybody said I didn't
    have a chance anymore. And I'm kind of looking down and just feeling
    sorry for myself. It was pitiful. [Laughter] And Dimitrious was working
    in that hotel, in his uniform. And I was walking through the kitchen,
    and he came up to me and stopped me in the kitchen, and he said,
    ``Governor,'' he said, ``I want to talk to you a minute. My 10-year-old
    boy''--his son was 10 then--he says, ``my 10-year-old boy, he studies
    this election in school, and he says I should vote for you.'' He said,
    ``But if I vote for you, I want you to do something for me.'' I said,
    ``What?'' He said, ``I want you to make my son free.'' I said, ``What do
    you mean?'' He said, ``Well, in the country where I came from we were
    poor, but we were free. I'm an immigrant. Here I'm doing well. I'm
    working hard. I have more money, but we're not free.'' He said, ``Just
    across the street from our apartment there is a park, but my son can't
    play in it unless I'm there with him. He has a school only two blocks
    from our home, but my son can't walk there

    [[Page 1360]]

    unless I go with him. So if I do what my son wants me to do, I want you
    to make my boy free.''
        They made an impression on me that will last for the rest of my
    life, and they were speaking for all of you. And I wanted you to see
    them today. They're riding the train with me to Chicago. Thank you, and
    God bless you.
        I hope you will support extending the Brady bill. I hope you will
    support banning cop-killer bullets. I hope you will support tougher
    penalties for people who deal drugs with guns. And I hope you will
    support a good, clean law saying nobody has got any business with a gun
    anywhere near a school. Help us to keep making America free.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:04 a.m. at the Columbus Police Academy.
    In his remarks, he referred to Chief of Police James Jackson of Columbus
    and Sheriff Jim Karnes of Franklin County.