[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[April 27, 1999]
[Pages 641-644]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 641]]


Remarks Announcing Proposed Gun Control Legislation
April 27, 1999

    Thank you very much, Carolyn, John 
Conyers, Senator Chafee, Senator Feinstein, all the 
many Members of Congress who are here. I thank the Attorney 
General, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of Education. I'm glad to see our old friend Mayor Helmke and Bob Walker and others here. 
We have, I think, over 40 Members of Congress here and two Senators who 
went back to the floor to fight for this issue to be put on the floor 
today.
    I would like to do two things. First, I want to tell you 
specifically what we are proposing, and I'll do that. But secondly, I 
would like to tie what we are proposing to all these culture arguments 
and talk about, if you will, at least two cultures that exist in 
America, and say that I think this, in the end, is going to come down to 
what our conception of America as a community is and what our 
responsibilities to one another are.
    I want to begin by saying a lot of people have made remarkable 
contributions, I think, to this effort to get us to look at the violence 
of our culture and how it makes the most vulnerable of our children, 
without regard to their income or their social status, closer to the 
line of taking violent action, and how it complicates family life for 
everyone.
    I want to thank Hillary for what 
she's done. I also want to thank Al and 
Tipper Gore, who have done enormously important 
work on this for years, to try to help us deal with the TV issues, the 
ratings, the V-chips, and now, the new efforts we've been making with 
the Internet community to give parents some more control over that and 
the efforts we have to make to train the parents to figure out how to do 
it, since their kids all know more about it than they do.
    But this is very important stuff. In June, Tipper Gore's going to host our White House Conference on Mental 
Health. And the Attorney General and 
Hillary and I were just talking about 
some of the things we can do to help to make sure all of our schools 
have the adequate mentoring and mediation and even mental health 
services our kids need. All this is very important. And we have to deal 
with that.
    But if you believe that we have special cultural challenges, it 
seems to me that that's an argument that we ought to bend over backwards 
to try to remove the opportunities for bad things happening, if we have 
more kids that are vulnerable to doing those things, not an argument 
that we ought to say, ``Well, we should walk away from that and just try 
to make sure everybody individually in the whole country never does 
anything wrong.''
    And what's the real problem here? The problem is, we have another 
culture in our country that I think has gotten confused about its 
objectives. We have a huge hunting and sport shooting culture in 
America, and unlike many of you, I grew up in it. I was 12 years old the 
first time I took a .22 and shot it at a can on a fencepost in the 
country. I know about this.
    We always talk about the NRA; the NRA has been powerful not only 
because they have a lot of money but because they can influence people 
who vote. And in that culture, people believe everybody should be 
personally responsible for their actions; if you just punish people who 
do wrong more harshly, fewer people will do wrong; and everybody tells 
me I've got a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, so don't fool 
with me; and every reasonable restriction is just the camel's nose in 
the tent, and pretty soon they'll come after my shotgun, and I'll miss 
the next duck hunting season.
    And we smile about that, but there are some people who would be on 
this platform today who lost their seats in 1994 because they voted for 
the Brady bill, and they voted for the assault weapons ban, and they did 
it in areas where people could be frightened. And the voters had not had 
enough time, which they did have within 2 more years, to see that nobody 
was going to take their gun away.
    So we have more than one cultural problem here. And I want to make a 
plea to everybody who is waiting for the next deer season in my home 
State to think about this in terms of what our reasonable obligations to 
the larger community of America are.
    Do we know for absolutely certain that if we had every reasonable 
law and the ones I'm going

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to propose here, that none of these school violence things would have 
happened? No. But we do know one thing for certain. We know there would 
have been fewer of them, and there would have been fewer kids killed in 
the last several years in America. We know that for certain. We know 
that.
    Cultures are hard to change. And cultures should never be used to 
avoid individual responsibility. But we--when we get to where we change, 
then we wonder. We look back and we say, ``How could we have ever done 
it otherwise?''
    Let me ask you something. Next time you get on an airplane, think 
about how you'd feel if the headline in the morning paper right before 
you got on the airplane was ``Airport Metal Detectors and X-Ray Machines 
Abolished as Infringement on Americans' Constitutional Right To 
Travel.'' Think about it. That's the headline in the morning paper. And 
right next to it there is another headline, ``Terrorist Groups Expanding 
Operations in the United States.'' And you read the two headlines, and 
you're getting on the airplane, exercising your constitutional right to 
travel, which is now no longer infringed by the fact that you might have 
to go through the metal detector twice and take out your money clip or 
take off your heavily metaled belt and that somebody is x raying your 
luggage as it gets on the airplane. It's unthinkable now, isn't it? This 
will become unthinkable, too, that we should ever reverse these things 
if we ever have enough sense to do them.
    But we still have a cultural and a political argument that says, to 
defend Americans' rights to reasonable hunting and sport shooting, you 
have to defend the indefensible, as well. This is--it doesn't make any 
sense at all, unless you're caught up in this sort of web of distorted 
logic and denial.
    But Carolyn McCarthy may have made the 
most important point here. We're all in here preaching to the saved. You 
wouldn't be here if you didn't agree. But somebody needs to call these 
Members that grew up where I grew up, that lived in the same culture I 
did, that belong to both parties, and say, ``Hey, we've got to make this 
like airport metal detectors and x-ray machines. This is about our 
community. This is about our responsibility to our children. This is 
about protecting our children and--the vulnerable children themselves--
from people who are about to go over the line here. And this is crazy 
that we're living in a society that takes no reasonable steps to protect 
the larger community.''
    So it's not just a culture of violence that has to change; it's the 
culture of hunting and sport shooting that has to stop financing efforts 
to frighten their members, who are good, God-fearing, law-abiding, 
taxpaying citizens out there, into believing that every time we try to 
save a kid's life, it's a camel's nose in the tent.
    I have had to go through those metal detectors as many as 3 times, 
back when I had a real life and I was traveling around, because I had 
all kinds of stuff in there--[laughter]--and every time I start to get a 
little aggravated, I think, ``Boy, I don't want that plane to blow up.'' 
[Laughter] You know, make me go through a dozen times if you want to--
and the person behind me.
    Now, we've got to think about this in that way. These are the folks 
we have to reach. When there are no constituents for this movement, the 
movement will evaporate. When people from rural Pennsylvania and rural 
West Virginia and rural Colorado and Idaho start calling their 
Congressmen and saying, ``Hey, man, we can live with this. We can live 
with this. This is no big deal, you know? I mean, we're just out there 
doing what we do. We'll gladly put up with an extra hassle, a little 
wait, a little this, a little that, because we want to save several 
thousand kids a year.''
    That is my challenge to you. That is what is going on.
    Now, here are the things we want to do. A lot of you won't think 
they're enough, but you remember the culture. You change the culture; 
we'll change the laws. You change the message; we'll do it. And none of 
them have anything to do with anybody's legitimate right to hunt.
    First of all, we ought to strengthen the Brady law. It's kept 
250,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers--the States now have the insta-
check system, which is good. The mandatory waiting period has expired; 
that's bad because we need it in addition to the insta-check system to 
give a cooling-off period to people who are in a fit of rage. It's 
important.
    The law that we would present, the act, will also prevent juveniles 
who commit violent crimes from ever buying a gun. It would apply the 
Brady law's prohibition to juvenile violence. It would require Brady 
background checks on

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anyone who wants to buy explosives--very important. And it would 
abolish, at long last, as Senator Feinstein said, a dangerous loophole 
that was likely exploited in Littleton, which allows people to buy 
weapons at gun shows without any background checks at all.
    Now, you need to go make this case on this gun show deal. I don't 
know how many of you have ever been to one of these gun shows. I've been 
to gun shows in rural America. People walk around, and they've got their 
cars, and they've got their trunk open, and people walk in and say, 
``This is nice, and that's nice,'' and ``This is a 100-year-old rifle,'' 
and blah, blah, blah. And then they say, ``This is just too much hassle, 
you know.'' People pay cash, and nobody, you know--so it's going to be a 
hassle for them. It's worth it. It's worth it. We're sorry. It's worth 
it.
    You don't have to pretend it won't be a hassle. Tell them you know 
it will be a hassle. It's worth it. People's lives are at stake here. 
What these shows started out doing, which was a good way for people who 
live in rural areas--it started out primarily in rural areas--who enjoy 
hunting and interested in different kinds of weapons, to have an 
interesting experience on a weekend afternoon, has turned out to be a 
gaping loophole through which criminals and deranged people and other 
people get guns they could not otherwise get.
    And so we have to say, ``We haven't asked you to abolish your gun 
shows, but we've asked you to undergo the inconvenience necessary to 
save more lives.'' We don't have to be insensitive; we just have to be 
determined. But I'm telling you, if we don't do something about this gun 
show loophole, we're going to continue to have serious, serious 
problems. And it's very important.
    The second thing we've got to do is to strengthen the assault 
weapons ban, to close the loophole that allows dealers to sell older, 
high-capacity ammunition magazines manufactured abroad. Now, I bet you--
when Senator Feinstein was talking about this, you thought, now, who in 
the world could be against this? I actually had a conversation with a 
Member of Congress who said to me--serious, a good person, it was a 
really good person, when we were doing this back in a '94, a really good 
person, this person I was talking to--who told me--[laughter]--let me 
tell you, I just want you to understand what the argument was. He said, 
``But you've got to understand, we've got people who use these bigger 
magazines for certain kinds of sport contests.'' And I said, ``Well, so 
what?'' [Laughter] But he said, ``They'll beat me if I vote for this.'' 
I said, ``They'll beat you if they think all you're doing is making 
their lives miserable because some Washington bureaucrat asked you to do 
it. If you can explain to them that it's worth a minor alteration in 
their sporting habits to save people's lives, they won't beat you.''
    But my point is, you've got to help these people. You hear this, and 
you think, ``God, this is a no-brainer. This is a hundred-to-nothing 
deal. Who in the wide world could ever be''--you have to understand, 
there is another culture out there. And almost everybody in it is God-
fearing, law-abiding, taxpaying, and they show up when they're needed. 
And they don't like this because they don't understand that if they do 
what you're asking them to do, they can save a lot of lives. And we have 
got to fix this. This is just pure mathematics; you're going to have 
fewer people die if you get rid of these magazines. So you need to go 
out there where the problem is and debate your fellow citizens and 
discuss it with them. It's important.
    The third thing the legislation would do is to raise the legal age 
of handgun possession from 18 to 21 years. It would also strengthen our 
zero tolerance for guns in schools, which, as one of the previous 
Members said, had led us to 6,000 suspensions or expulsions last year, 
by requiring schools to report to the police any student who brings a 
gun to school and requiring that the student get counseling. That, I 
think, is very important.
    The provision holding adults criminally responsible would only 
apply, but--this is quite important--but it would apply if they 
recklessly failed to keep firearms out of the reach of young people. 
This would mandate a steep increase in penalties for adults who transfer 
guns illegally to juveniles. It would require child safety locks to be 
sold with all new guns.
    Finally, it would crack down on illegal gun trafficking, doubling 
the number of cities now working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and 
Firearms to trace every gun seized by the police. I know this is very 
important to Congresswoman McCarthy.
    It would require that dealers submit information not only on the 
guns they sell but on used

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guns, which are often very hard for law enforcement agencies to trace. 
It would significantly increase penalties for gun runners caught 
trafficking large numbers of firearms. It would establish a national 
system, as soon as it's feasible, to limit handgun purchases to one a 
month, following the lead of Virginia.
    You know, I've got to say--this is very interesting. When we were 
going over the list of things we wanted to propose, some people said, 
``Well, that might be a loser because it sounds to people who care about 
this like that's too many, and what is this?'' You know, the States that 
have had big problems in the past, with lots of illegal gun purchases 
and guns then being used for illegal purposes--Virginia did this, and it 
really helped them. This was a big deal. And I just talked to Senator 
Robb about this a couple days ago, and he 
said, ``You know, all I can tell you is it's working in our State.'' So 
I would ask you to seriously consider what this might mean for our 
efforts to control the law enforcement aspects of this.
    So these are the things that I wanted to say. But I hope you'll 
remember what I said to you about the culture. We do have to keep 
working on the culture. Hillary's 
right about it. Al and Tipper Gore are right about it. We've got a lot of 
responsibilities. We've got to keep working on the services for kids. 
We've even got to work on helping parents actually communicate with 
their children.
    One Senator called me the night before last and said he'd had a town 
meeting in his State with children. And he asked how many of the 
schoolchildren had actually talked to their parents about what happened 
in Littleton. And only 10 percent of the kids raised their hands. And 
one child said, ``I had to go and turn off the television and tell my 
parents we were going to talk about it.'' She said, ``They're just 
scared. They're scared. They didn't know how to talk about it.''
    So there are all these cultural issues. And then there's this big 
cultural issue of the gun and sport hunting culture. And I hope that--a 
lot of my folks at home might take offense at what I said today, but I'm 
trying to help explain them to you. And I felt comfortable taking on 
these issues, and I thought maybe I was in a unique position to take on 
all these gun issues all these years because of where I grew up and 
because I understand how people think who don't agree with this.
    But I'm telling you, we've got to keep working until people start 
thinking about this stuff the same way they think about x rays and metal 
detectors at airports. That's the goal. We have to redefine the national 
community so that we have a shared obligation to save children's lives. 
And we've got to get out of this crazy denial that this won't make a 
difference. It's crazy; it won't make--just because it won't make all 
the difference doesn't mean it won't make a difference. It will make a 
difference.
    I implore you to remember what these Members have said. I implore 
you to go out and get people going at the grassroots, as Carolyn 
McCarthy said. We need help. We can pass all this if the American people 
want it bad enough. We can pass it all if the American people want it 
badly enough. And we don't need to go through another Littleton for the 
American people to want it badly enough. You can help make sure that 
happens.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:15 p.m. in Presidential Hall (formerly 
Room 450) in the Old Executive Office Building. In his remarks, he 
referred to Mayor Paul Helmke of Fort Wayne, IN; and Bob Walker, 
president, Handgun Control, Inc., and the Center to Prevent Handgun 
Violence. The transcript released by the Office of the Press Secretary 
also included the remarks of First Lady Hillary Clinton.