[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.