[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
[June 11, 1997]
[Pages 717-720]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Juvenile Justice Conference
June 11, 1997

    Thank you very much, Attorney General Reno, Ray Kelly, Father 
O'Donovan. Let me say to my good friend Father O'Donovan, I never know 
when I come to Georgetown whether being introduced as the university's 
most well-known alumnus will be a liability or an asset. It just depends 
on what month I come, I think. When Ray Kelly said he considered the 
Jesuits the Marine Corps of the Catholic Church, I never really thought 
of that. And then he went through that litany, you know, ``the few, the 
proud'' and all that, I was thinking about the ones who taught me in 
class. I was thinking, ``the few, the proud, the brutal.'' [Laughter] 
But brilliantly brutal.
    I love this place, and I thank Father O'Donovan for having us here 
at the conference. I also want to thank the Attorney General and Ray 
Kelly for the truly unprecedented partnership that they have established 
with local law enforcement officials and others who are interested in 
the safety of our streets and our children throughout the United States. 
We have here representatives of the Fraternal Order of Police, of the 
Major Cities Chiefs Association, the law enforcement community, a lot of 
other people who just work with young people and try to help give them 
something to say yes to.
    I'm glad to see our friend Jim Brady here. The country owes a lot of 
thanks to Jim and to Sarah, for with courage and persistence and good 
humor, they have saved a lot of lives with the Brady bill, the assault 
weapons ban, and others.
    We are here today to talk about what we can do together to build 
safer neighborhoods and stronger neighborhoods as part of the 
preparation of America for a new century. Today I want to talk about 
violent youth gangs and

[[Page 718]]

the illegal guns they use, the biggest problem, perhaps, we still face 
in that ongoing struggle.
    But as Ray Kelly said, this is a good time to be involved in law 
enforcement because the good guys are winning and the tide of crime is 
being rolled back. Four and a half years ago, I can honestly say, when I 
went around the country in 1992 seeking the Presidency and began to talk 
about the importance of more police and effective prevention programs 
along with tougher punishment--and actually I said I was confident that 
we could bring the crime rate way down over a sustained period of time--
most people did not believe me.
    You might be interested to know that every national survey I've seen 
says that most people still don't believe it. [Laughter] Even though 
those of you who are involved in this endeavor know that crime is now 
down for several years in a row and we had the largest drop in 35 years 
last year, most people still don't believe it. It may be because a crime 
story still leads the evening news. It may be the accumulation of 
personal experiences; nearly everybody has someone in their family who 
has been victimized. It may be an instinctive feeling that whether the 
crime rate has gone down or not, it's still too high and there are still 
too many of our children at risk.
    But nonetheless, it has gone down. And a lot of you in this room 
have helped to make it so. And we tried to work with you and also to 
learn from you what actually works, not what sounds good in a television 
ad, not what sounds good in a political campaign, but what actually 
works: putting more police on the street, taking gangs and guns off the 
streets, having proven, effective prevention programs that keep our 
children out of trouble and prevent crimes from occurring in the first 
place.
    That's what we tried to do with the crime bill and the Brady bill, 
with the assault weapons ban, with the violence against women act, and 
the other things that the Attorney General spoke about. It's what we've 
tried to do with our strongest effort ever to make our schools drug-free 
and gun-free, to have zero tolerance for guns in schools, to make it 
illegal for minors to possess handguns and for adults to transfer 
handguns to minors. It's what General McCaffrey is working so hard on in 
his position as our Nation's drug czar.
    And thanks to all of you, the strategy is working. Even the juvenile 
crime rate showed some decline in 1995, and the juvenile crime arrest 
rate has begun to go down as a result of your unceasing efforts. But we 
know that juvenile violence is still a huge problem. We know violent 
youth gangs still terrorize our streets. We know innocent children are 
still being swept up in them and may soon be innocent no longer.
    According to a report released by the Justice Department, unless we 
act and do more now, the number of juveniles arrested for violent crimes 
will more than double by the year 2010. We have got to show the same 
progress with young people, with juvenile crime, with violence, that we 
have seen in the overall crime rate with adults in the last 5 years. 
Keep in mind, this year when school started, we had the largest class of 
children starting school and the largest number of people in school in 
the history of America. This year is the first year that the number of 
schoolchildren exceeded the high watermark of the baby boom, which means 
that demographically we have just a few years to deal with our young 
people and give them a future and something to say yes to and to deal 
with this gang and drug and gun problem before the sheer change in 
population will begin to overwhelm our efforts.
    So I think we know enough and a lot of you have shown us enough to 
be just as optimistic about this as we now can be about the general 
problem of crime. But we also have seen enough and we know enough to 
know that we have to move and move now.
    In February, I sent juvenile justice legislation that I felt was 
very smart and very tough to Congress to declare war on gangs and guns 
but to do things that you say and that you have shown will work. It was 
largely modeled on Boston's famous Operation Cease-Fire. It guarantees 
new antigang prosecutors that are desperately needed to pursue and 
prosecute violent juveniles. It gives prosecutors the right to seek 
tougher penalties. It supports initiatives like Operation Night Light in 
Boston, where police and probation officers actually make housecalls to 
young probationers and their families to make sure that they live up to 
the rules of their probation. And when I was in Boston, not very long 
ago--we spent over a half a day there--the people said that their 
compliance rate was around 70 percent, which I'm quite confident is the 
highest in the country. But these things will work.

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    Because about 40 percent of juvenile crime occurs after school 
closes and before parents come home--so much for the argument that 
parents don't make any difference--the youth violence strategy we 
presented would help to launch 1,000 after-school initiatives all over 
the country, again, modeled on what is working today--not rocket 
science, just following the leader to save lives.
    We know now that children should be allowed to stay in school or 
involved in other activities rather than left on street corners until 
their parents come home from work. We know now that it would be better 
if our children had teachers or community leaders or team leaders as 
role models, not gang leaders. We know that our children should be 
supervised by caring adults, not young people who have entered a gang 
culture.
    The bill that I presented dealt with all this. It also is just as 
tough on guns as on gangs. I don't care what anybody says--guns are 
still at the heart of the gangs that strike at the hearts of our 
communities and families. Every year thousands of children and young 
people are killed by them, even more wounded and maimed. Listen to this: 
Teenage homicides by firearms tripled in the 10 years between 1984 and 
1994, and the number of juveniles actually killing with guns quadrupled 
during the same period.
    When the National Center for Health Statistics tells us that teenage 
boys are more likely to die from gunshot wounds than from any other 
cause, we know that we have more than a duty, we have a moral obligation 
to keep fighting against this terrible scourge of gun violence, to build 
on the pathbreaking work done by Jim Brady and others, and to go beyond 
what we have done so far.
    That's why the juvenile crime bill I presented to Congress extends 
the Brady bill to prevent juvenile criminals from purchasing guns when 
they reach legal age. You shouldn't be able to commit a violent crime at 
16 or 17, then buy a handgun for your 21st birthday. This bill would 
make that illegal, and I hope all of you will help us pass it.
    The bill also requires that child safety locks be sold with guns to 
keep children from hurting themselves or each other. Unbelievably, a 
third of all privately owned handguns in our country are left both 
unlocked and loaded. Every one of them has the power and the potential 
to make the life of one of our children lost by accident or design. 
Child safety locks are simple and inexpensive, but they do have the 
power to prevent tragedy.
    I feel so strongly about them that in March I ordered Federal 
agencies to give them to our agents. Today, every FBI and ATF agent has 
such a child safety device, and by the 15th of October, every Federal 
agent, from the DEA to the U.S. Marshal, to the Border Patrol, to the 
Park Police, will have one as well. If a child safety lock is good 
enough for law enforcement, it ought to be good enough for the general 
public. These commonsense measures will help to cut off young people's 
access to guns that can cut short their lives.
    Today we are taking comprehensive action to protect our children and 
our communities from juvenile crime and gun violence. In Boston, where 
many of these efforts are already in place, youth murders have dropped 
80 percent in 5 years and not a single, solitary child has been killed 
with a handgun in a year and a half--in a year and a half. We can do 
that. Again I say, this is not rocket science; this is replication.
    You know, when I was in Houston a couple years ago and I saw the 
juvenile crime rate going down there when it was going up everywhere 
else, the mayor said, ``It's not very complicated. I've got 3,000 kids 
in a soccer league and 2,500 in a golf league, and most of them didn't 
know anything about either sport before we started.'' This is not rocket 
science; it is replication. We know what works. There is no excuse for 
not doing what works. And there is no excuse for the Congress not giving 
you the tools to do what works.
    Now, I believe the approach embodied in the legislation I presented 
gives us the best chance to prevent more of this violence and to 
actually break its back. That's what I believe. I believe it because I 
have seen so many of you do it. Now, the bill that passed the House of 
Representatives, I think, falls far short of the goals of the bill that 
I presented and far short of reflecting what you have proved works. A 
juvenile crime bill that doesn't crack down on guns and gangs, that 
doesn't guarantee more prosecutors, more probation officers, and more 
prevention programs after school is a juvenile crime bill in name only.
    I understand you can pass a bill and make it very popular if all it 
does is seem to penalize

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people. And I am not against tougher penalties; we have toughened a lot 
of penalties since I have been President. But to pretend that you can do 
that and not guarantee the police, the prosecutors, the probation 
officers, and the prevention programs and expect to have results is 
simply wrong. You work in this area, and you know it. So let's go back 
to the Congress and get a bill that will give you the tools to give our 
children their futures back and our people their neighborhoods and their 
streets back. We can do it together.
    Let me just say something about one specific problem. The illegal 
guns that youth gangs use do not just come out of thin air. They are 
bought and sold, traded and given in trade, just like any other guns. 
And all too often, it is adults who are making the transfer. So today, 
I'm directing the Secretary of the Treasury, Bob Rubin, to require all 
federally licensed gun dealers to post signs in their stores and issue 
written warnings with each gun they sell to put adult gun purchasers on 
clear and unambiguous notice that selling or giving a handgun to a minor 
is dangerous, it is wrong, but it is also against the law, and it is a 
felony so serious that it can carry a penalty of up to 10 years in 
prison. I want every adult who buys a gun to see that sign and think 
about it before they give a child a gun that could wind up in gang 
violence.
    In the last 4 years, we have proven that if we work together and 
learn from each other, we can begin to turn the tide and win the war, as 
Ray Kelly said. Now we have an opportunity that is real and genuine to 
build on that progress. Your presence here, your enthusiasm, and what I 
know about the work you have done back home give me great hope that we 
can give our children a safe and orderly environment where they can make 
the most of their lives.
    We know that a lot of this will have to be done at the community 
level. When we did the Summit of Service that the Presidents sponsored 
in Philadelphia, one of the five things we said we wanted for our 
children was a safe environment for every child in America to grow up 
in. And we know that a lot of that has to be done by you. But we also 
know that we at the national level have our responsibility, too. And our 
responsibility now is to continue to implement the crime bill and put 
the community police officers out there, to be faithful in our 
enforcement of all the Federal laws that we can, and to deal with the 
special problems of guns and to pass a smart, balanced juvenile justice 
crime bill that does more than talk tough.
    I pledge to work with Congress of both parties to pass such a bill. 
I look forward to working with all of you to get the job done, but I say 
again: The most powerful argument for doing it is the experience you 
have already had, the successes you have already achieved, the lives you 
have already saved.
    When you know what works and you do it and you see children's lives 
reclaimed, it becomes unconscionable not to do more. I am determined 
that we will do more and that we will win this incredibly important 
struggle.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 12:09 p.m. in Salon H of the Conference 
Center at Georgetown University. In his remarks, he referred to Under 
Secretary of the Treasury for Enforcement Raymond W. Kelly; Father Leo 
O'Donovan, president, Georgetown University; Sarah Brady, chair, Handgun 
Control, Inc., and her husband, former White House Press Secretary James 
S. Brady; and Mayor Bob Lanier of Houston, TX.