[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[April 29, 1999]
[Pages 657-660]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Interview With Katie Couric of the National 
Broadcasting Corporation
April 29, 1999

Gun Control Legislation

    Ms. Couric. Mr. President, first of all, thank you very, very much 
for talking with us this afternoon. We really appreciate it.
    Senator Trent Lott called your proposed gun control legislation the 
typical knee-jerk reaction, and Congressman Tom DeLay accused you of 
exploiting the issue for political benefit. You would say to them?
    The President. That's ridiculous, and down deep they know it. I think--you know, 
what I tried to say the other day is that we have a culture with too 
much violence in it for our children, and we need to address that, 
television,

[[Page 658]]

the Internet, the whole range of things. But we also have a culture in 
America full of good people who are devoted to hunting and sport 
shooting, whose political views on these issues, I think, have been 
manipulated to create a movement that has terrified a lot of Members of 
Congress from taking the most elemental precautions to keep criminals 
and keep children from having guns that they shouldn't have, that any 
other society in the world would take.
    Ms. Couric. Good people----
    The President. And that's why we have--well, what I mean is, most of 
the people that are involved in serious hunting and sport shooting, 
they're law-abiding; they pay their taxes; they do what they're asked to 
do for the country; they're fine people. But they have been convinced 
that the most modest, sensible ways of keeping society safer are some 
kind of camel's nose in a tent that will end up in the loss of their 
rifles, and that's ridiculous.
    You know, the Brady bill has kept over a quarter of a million 
felons, fugitives, and stalkers from getting guns. Who knows how many 
people it saved. But we've got loopholes in the Brady bill. We've got 
loopholes in the assault weapons ban. We've got loopholes in the 
restrictions on these bit ammunition clips. We don't apply background 
checks at gun shows, which we ought to. We don't apply background checks 
to the purchase of explosives, which we ought to. These are sensible 
measures that will keep people alive.
    Ms. Couric. Who are these people being manipulated by? The National 
Rifle Association?
    The President. The National Rifle Association and some of these 
other groups as well.
    Ms. Couric. The NRA, by the way, Mr. President, is getting ready to 
meet in Denver. If you could have a cup of coffee with Charlton Heston 
before that meeting gets underway, what would you say to him?
    The President. I would say it's, ``You 
ought to be Moses and lead your people out of Egypt into the Promised 
Land. You ought to think about how we can protect the rights of hunters 
and use the good things the NRA's done to educate children, young 
people, on gun safety, for example. And stop wasting your energy when we 
try to say that a juvenile that commits a violent crime shouldn't have a 
gun; stop wasting your energy when we try to reinstitute the waiting 
period for the Brady bill or close the assault weapons loopholes or 
close the loopholes in the Brady bill or say that we ought to have a 
background check for explosives or a background check at these gun 
shows. That's what we ought to do.''
    This is designed to keep people alive, for goodness sakes. This has 
nothing to do with the right to hunt or to engage in sporting contests.
    Ms. Couric. Mr. President, do you believe any elements of your gun 
control package might have prevented the tragedy in Littleton?
    The President. Well, we have to have all the facts. We know that 
they were involved with explosives. We know they had an assault pistol. 
We also--one of the things we didn't talk about is that I want to 
strengthen the tracking--weapons tracking capacity of the Government 
when weapons pass through multiple hands. There may have been a gun show 
sale involved here. Depending on who bought it, we don't know what the 
background check would have occurred.
    What we do know is that if all these proposals were in place, they 
would save more lives more places. Just the Brady bill alone has kept a 
quarter of a million people from getting guns who had questionable 
backgrounds. There's no doubt in my mind that a lot of lives were saved. 
The assaults weapons ban is a good thing, but there are too many 
loopholes in it, and we want to close them. This just makes sense.

Responsibilities of Parents

    Ms. Couric. President Clinton, you've admitted that access to guns 
is just part of the problem. Another part is parenting in this country, 
or lack thereof. What are parents doing wrong?
    The President. Let me tell you a story, because I don't think it's 
so much as what they're doing as maybe as what they're not doing. A 
Member of the Congress, who is a friend of mine, and I had a 
conversation the other night. And he had just been with a high school, 
and he asked the students at the high school--this was a few days after 
Littleton--how many of them had talked to their parents about this. And 
he said only a small minority raised their hands. And one young woman 
stood up and said, ``I had to stand in front of the television and tell 
my parents we were going to not watch any more television until we 
talked about this, because I think they were afraid. They didn't want to 
deal with the fact that this could happen in other places in America.''

[[Page 659]]

    I think that what we have to do is to, first of all, tell parents 
they have to assume responsibility for their children's television and 
video games and all that. They have to assume their family 
responsibility for that. But they also have to know, insofar as they 
possibly can, what's going on in their children's lives and minds. And 
we have to work with them to help them develop the skills necessary to 
determine if their kids need help and then get the help they need, 
whether it's counseling or mental health services or whatever.
    Ms. Couric. That sounds great, but do you enroll every parent in 
America in parenting classes?
    The President. No. I think what you need is--Hillary's told me this morning--we got up, and we talked 
late, late last night about this. And then we got up this morning, and 
we were talking again. And she said--I thought it was a great idea--she 
said, ``What's worked in this country to change societies?'' We just had 
a big announcement today from Secretary Shalala that teen pregnancy's gone down for another year. There's 
been a national campaign against teen pregnancy, a real movement that 
asked all sectors of our society, starting with parents, but including 
everyone else, to do something on this. We've seen a decline in drunk 
driving, largely spurred, I think, by Mothers and Students Against Drunk 
Driving. We saw a national campaign to get people to wear their 
seatbelts when they were driving. And she said, and I agree, we need a 
national campaign that mobilizes all these things, that doesn't pretend 
that guns are the issue, that culture is the whole issue, that parents 
are the whole issue, that school safety is the whole issue but deals 
with all of this together. If the American people make up their mind 
that we're going to do better on this, we'll do better.

Role of Entertainment Industry

    Ms. Couric. But as you know, Mr. President, parents and children and 
families are bombarded with these violent images every day on 
television, in the movies. Video games reward children for obliterating 
figures with virtual bullets and bombs. Many parents want to do the 
right thing, but these cultural influences are so enormously strong, 
they feel as if they're swimming against this tide.
    The President. They are. I have two or three things to say about 
that.
    First of all, the first amendment prohibits us from banning some of 
these things, but we now have a television rating system, to go with the 
movies rating system. We will soon have all new televisions with a V-
chip in them, so the rating systems can be enforced by parents. We are 
seeing more and more technology develop which will allow some websites 
to be blocked by parents, if they're inappropriate.
    We first have to try to get parents more control over the exposure 
of their children to the culture of violence. The second thing we have 
to do is to challenge the entertainment industry to minimize the use of 
gratuitous violence and not to present it in a way that will desensitize 
people to the pain, the agony, and ultimately, the finality of violence.
    Ms. Couric. But for many of those people, that's their stock-in-
trade.
    The President. It is, and there's a market for it. The American 
people buy it. They purchase it. They lap it up. But I think we have to 
face the fact that kids today are growing up in a culture that is more 
violent, culturally violent. The crime rate has been going down for 6 
years overall, but the images are violent. And therefore, children that 
are more vulnerable are more likely, A, to be desensitized to violence 
and, then, to actually be desensitized to the impact of their employing 
violence.
    But I think in the end you've got to take it back to the fact that 
we all have responsibilities, and it starts with parents. We have to 
help convince our children that they should not have their actions 
controlled or directed outside them, and they shouldn't let other people 
define what kind of people they are. And we've then got to do more in 
the schools, with counseling, with mediation, with getting mental health 
services where they need it. And we've got to then ask ourselves, what 
are the further responsibilities of the entertainment community? What 
are the responsibilities of the Government?
    Go back to the gun industry. Something they could do that I think 
would be great--I'm talking about the manufacturers now--they ought to 
voluntarily come forward, as many have, and say, we're going to have 
more child trigger locks. They even are now developing technologies 
where a thumbprint can be imprinted on a gun and only the people who 
have the print can fire the gun. There are lots of things that can be 
done, but if we're all caught up in this and

[[Page 660]]

it becomes our obsession, I know we will do better. I know we will.
    Ms. Couric. Some Members of Congress have asked for an emergency 
summit meeting at the White House with leaders of the entertainment 
industry. Do you plan to have that summit?
    The President. Well, I plan to bring some high-level folks from the 
entertainment industry and from other sectors of our society that I 
think can be active here together at the White House in the near future, 
and then figure out how we can put together the elements of a national 
campaign. I think the entertainment industry is going to have to be a 
big part of it.
    What I think is a mistake is--I think it would be a mistake for the 
people who don't want to offend the NRA to blame Hollywood and the 
people that don't want to offend Hollywood to blame the NRA, instead of 
keeping our children and their safety and their future in mind and 
asking ourselves, what should we do about guns? What should we do about 
culture? What should we do about the schools? How can we help the 
parents? And what is Government's responsibility? Those are the big 
questions. We should ask and answer all of them, not just one.
    Ms. Couric. Mr. President, can you say to Hollywood executives, 
``Look, I need your help''? Or is it tough to put pressure on them, 
given the fact that they've been so supportive of you and so generous to 
your campaigns?
    The President. No. No, it's easier for me to do, I think, in some 
ways, because I know them. Keep in mind, the first time I went out to 
Hollywood and did this in a highly public way was in late 1993. And then 
we got a lot of Hollywood executives in, and they played a major role in 
the development of the television rating systems, which was essential to 
make the V-chip work.
    So we got a lot of support out of the entertainment community for 
the rating systems and for the V-chip. We've gotten a remarkable amount 
of support in the years since from the high-tech community for control 
technologies on the Internet. So I think that--they don't go as far as I 
wish they would often on the violent content of some movies and some 
television shows and some video games, but there has been progress made.
    One of the big problems we've got now is to make sure parents 
understand how to use the V-chip on television and understand how to use 
the blocking technologies on the Internet. Most parents are like me; 
they're not nearly as computer literate as their children are. And we've 
got a big job there to do.
    But yes, I have no problem asking them to do more and challenging 
them to do more. That's easy. The difficult thing is to ask all of those 
questions of all of those people I mentioned. That's why I think the 
First Lady's idea of having a 
national campaign in which we all get caught up is the right way to go 
here.
    Ms. Couric.  And yet, it inevitably gets so mired in politics, and 
the best of intentions, it seems, are----
    The President. Well, I think the only thing that gets mired in 
politics on this score, really, is when you have to pass a bill in 
Congress that's opposed by powerful interest groups. But otherwise, I 
think at a community level and in terms of empowering the schools and 
the parents and organizing groups to demand changes, I think it will be 
pretty straightforward.
    And even in Congress, as I told this group I spoke to a few days 
ago, if the American people want change badly enough, the Congress will 
respond. They'll go beyond partisan politics. They'll go beyond interest 
group politics. If they believe the American people want it bad enough, 
they'll respond.
    Ms. Couric. Mr. President, thank you again for your time. We really 
appreciate it.
    The President. Thank you.

Note: The interview began at 4:25 p.m. in the Library at the White 
House. In his remarks, the President referred to Charlton Heston, 
president, National Rifle Association. The transcript was released by 
the Office of the Press Secretary on April 30. A tape was not available 
for verification of the content of this interview.