    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [October 19, 1999]
    [Pages 1820-1824]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Voices Against Violence Conference
    October 19, 1999

        Thank you. Good morning. I think Rebecca Hunter did a wonderful job with her pledge and with her
    introduction, don't you? Let's give her another hand. [Applause] I
    thought she was great.
        I would like to begin by thanking our House Democratic leader, Dick
    Gephardt, and all others who were
    involved in this Voices Against Violence meeting. I want to thank
    Congressmen Frost, Bonior, DeLauro, Clement, and Menendez, who are over
    here to my left. And I see Representative Capps
    out there. There may be more Members of Congress here. I thank all of
    them for being here.
        I would like to thank our Secretary of Education, Dick Riley, who came with me; Jeff Bleich, who runs our national grassroots campaign against youth
    violence. And I'd like to thank Ananda Lewis of
    MTV and all the other organizations who are working to help make this a
    safer place for all of you. I thank the parents, the teachers, and the
    chaperons who came here with you today.

    [[Page 1821]]

        But most of all, I came here to say thank you to all of you for
    taking responsibility, taking a stand in raising your voices against
    violence.
        I also have to say that this is a good day for me for you to be here
    because I know a lot of you have been trained in conflict resolution,
    and I'm meeting with the leaders of the Congress this afternoon, the
    Republicans and the Democrats, to try to resolve our conflict over the
    budget. [Laughter] And if I don't do so well, I may keep some of you in
    Washington for an extra day or 2 to help me. I think that would be a
    good idea.
        Actually, we do agree on things from time to time. Later today I'm
    going to sign legislation that will make good our common commitment to
    veterans, housing, science and technology, and to a part of what I call
    my new markets initiative, to give economic opportunity to the poor
    parts of America where our recovery has not reached.
        And now we have to finish the rest of the budget. The most important
    thing to me and to all of us is that we do a good job on education. It
    has got to be the number one priority for our country for the new
    century. We have the largest and most diverse student population we have
    ever had. It poses new challenges for us, but it gives America an
    unprecedented opportunity.
        So I want you to see what we want to do about youth violence in the
    larger context of what I believe should be our commitment to give you
    the best possible education and the best possible future that any
    children have ever had in the history of our country.
        We're trying to put 100,000 teachers in our classrooms for smaller
    classes. We're trying to build or modernize 6,000 schools, because so
    many kids are in housetrailers and broken-down old schools today,
    because there are so many more schoolchildren than we've ever had
    before. We're trying to make sure that by the end of next year we have
    hooked up every classroom in America to the Internet. We're trying to
    provide funds for summer school and after-school programs, funds to turn
    around schools that aren't doing a good job, more efforts to mentor
    young people in middle school to get them ready to go on to college.
        We're also fighting for funds for health care and the environment
    and for more community police officers. And we're doing it in a way that
    will enable us to do something else you should care about, which is to
    save Social Security and Medicare when the so-called baby boom
    generation retires, and then there will only be about two people your
    age working for every one person retired. And it's very important that
    we use this moment, here, where we're prosperous, to protect your
    future.
        Most of us who are in the baby boom generation are panicked by the
    thought that when we retire, we'll impose a big burden on your
    generation and your ability to raise your kids. So we're determined to
    avoid that, and we can.
        And finally, let me say, from the time I was your age until today,
    our country has always been in debt, and over the last 10 or 12 years,
    increasingly so, before I became President. We've got a chance to get
    this country out of debt over the next 15 years, to make America debt-
    free for the first time since 1835, and I hope we will do that.
        I've been asking all the American people, including our young
    people, to imagine the future and to recognize that our country has a
    certain, unique moment here, when we've got a lot of prosperity and when
    our problems have been laid bare for us for all to see by tragic
    instances, like the instance at Columbine. But it's not the only kind of
    violence young people are subjected to. They're also subjected to hate
    crimes: Matthew Shepard being killed in Wyoming; the children shot at,
    at the Jewish community center; and then the Filipino postalworker
    murdered; the young Korean killed in the Middle West by the guy on the
    hate crime spree who also killed the African-American former basketball
    coach at Northwestern.
        So when you have all these opportunities out there and you have your
    problems laid bare and you have the strength of the country and the
    prosperity of the country giving us the confidence do deal with them,
    what I hope you will say to everybody here and when you go back home is,
    America will never have a better time to face its biggest problems;
    America will never have a better time to save all of its children. And
    that is what I think we ought to be thinking about.
        You heard Congressman Gephardt say that our crime rate has been
    going down 7 years in a row. That's the first time that's happened for
    over 40 years. The overall crime rate is the lowest it has been in 26
    years. The murder rate is the lowest it has been in more than 30 years.
    That sounds great, and I'm proud of

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    that. And I'm glad we've worked on that. But does anybody think America
    is as safe as it ought to be? No. Of course not, obviously.
        Six months after Columbine--tomorrow, 6 months after Columbine, no
    serious person believes that America is as safe as it ought to be. And
    every day, every day we lose more than a dozen kids to violence. They
    die in ones and twos, so we don't see them on the evening news; we don't
    see their names blared in headlines.
        So why don't you help us adopt a real goal? Why don't we, together,
    say that we're going to make America the safest big country in the world
    in the 21st century, starting with making our children safe? You can do
    that, and that's what I want to do.
        We need an organized way in every community in America to capture
    the spirit that brought you to Washington this week. We need people
    working on specific things. I thought Rebecca Hunter's pledge was great. You just think about it. If every
    young person in every high school and junior high school in America took
    the pledge that she stated and acted on it, violence would go down. At
    least violence perpetrated by young people would go down.
        I want you to help us while you're here. What else can we do? How do
    we make our schools sanctuaries of safety? How do we recognize the early
    warning signs of violence? How do we teach people to resolve their
    differences peacefully? How do we share good ideas from one community to
    another? How can people who are injured find it in their hearts to
    forgive people they've been angry at, instead of trying to get even?
    These are very important questions.
        It seems to me there is no quick-fix solution, and what we have to
    do in Washington is to try to give you the tools and the framework and
    as safe as possible condition to do this work. But our young people have
    to be reached one by one. In many ways, all of you can have more
    influence on your peers than I can as President, or than any of us can.
    We can try, but you can make all the difference.
        I also would like to say that I think that this conference has to
    recognize that there are things that you can do and things that we have
    to do and that we have some obligations here to understand the problem
    of youth violence in the environment as a greater violent level of our
    community. And let me just mention a few things. Mr. Gephardt mentioned
    a couple of them before, but when I took office, almost 7 years ago now,
    I had spent a lot of time going from community to community, walking the
    streets with police officers and with community leaders, sitting and
    listening to young people talk about the violence in their streets. I'll
    never forget, I was in California one time--this was way--8 or 9 years
    ago--and this young person in a grade school told me what it was like
    when they had a drive-by shooting at random and all the kids had to get
    out of their desks and hit the floor. And I've listened to people talk
    to me about this stuff.
        And I asked the Congress to do what the local people told me would
    help to lower crime. So we put more community policing programs out
    there; we passed the Brady bill; we banned assault weapons. We did a lot
    of things that were good, and we supported local community initiatives.
    We had a zero tolerance for guns in school policy.
        And as I said, it is working, and that is good. But now I think we
    have to do some more things. I also should say that all these people
    here in our caucus who supported all those crime policies took a lot of
    heat for doing it, because we were told that--the NRA told everybody we
    were going to take their guns away and they couldn't go hunting anymore.
    Well, everybody's still hunting, but it's a safer country, and we're
    still having the same argument up here.
        We held the first-ever school safety conference at the White House,
    and we gave over $100 million in safe school grants to schools and
    communities to help them fight youth violence. We started mentoring
    programs to help kids know that if they stayed in school and stayed out
    of trouble, they could actually go on to college. And after the terrible
    wave of violence culminating in Columbine, I launched a new White House
    youth violence council to coordinate our work throughout all the
    Government agencies.
        Now, today we are going to release at the Government level--this
    makes the very point I made to you in the beginning about why I'm glad
    you're here--today we're going to release our second annual report on
    school safety. The Secretary of Education
    has done wonderful work on this. It shows that, once again, the vast
    majority of our schools are safe. It also shows they're getting safer,
    which is a tribute to you

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    and to your teachers. Homicides in schools remain rare. Crimes are down
    both in and out of school, and there are now far fewer students carrying
    weapons to schools than there were 6 years ago. That's the good news.
        The bad news is we've had Columbine, Jonesboro, Springfield, Pearl--
    I could go on and on--all the places where there have been these
    horrible examples of school violence. We know that more and more
    students feel unsafe. So I want to say to you that--again I say, I want
    you to help us with new ideas. But I want to tell you what we're doing
    now, up here. And then I want to close and ask you to think about
    something for the rest of the time you're here.
        First of all, we want to do more to help you reach other people. Our
    Justice Department and the Education Department worked with MTV to
    provide a youth action guide and a CD that focused on concrete steps to
    reduce youth violence, such as mentoring, conflict resolution, and youth
    advocacy. I want to thank the Recording Industry Association of America
    for their help in putting this CD together. We've already distributed
    over a quarter of a million, over 250,000 of these CD's. Today the
    Justice Department is going to send out 200,000 more to organizations
    around the country: after-school programs, law enforcement agencies,
    foundations, and civic groups.
        Now, this CD basically sounds a call for action. It's a commonsense
    tool that helps to make a difference if it's put in the right hands, the
    hands of people like you. And we're doing our part. But let me also say,
    to again echo what Mr. Gephardt said, we need Congress to help us.
    Especially, we need Congress to help us to keep guns out of the wrong
    hands.
        Now, I've heard all this talk with--people say it doesn't really
    matter whether we do anything about guns. All I know is, we passed the
    Brady bill. We've kept 400,000 people with criminal backgrounds from
    buying handguns since 1994, and we have the lowest crime rate in 26
    years. I don't believe the things are unrelated.
        And one of the real problems with the Brady bill is there is a
    loophole: If you buy a gun at a gun show or in urban flea markets, they
    don't have to do a background check on you. So we want to close that. We
    also want to ban the import of large ammunition clips. And we want to
    require child-safety locks.
        Let me just give you this statistic to think about. You want to be
    against unintentional violence as well as intentional violence. The
    accidental death rate of children from guns in America--the accidental
    death rate--listen to this--is 9 times higher than the rates for the
    next 25 biggest industrial countries combined. You take the next 25
    biggest economies and put them all together, our accidental death rate
    from guns is 9 times higher than all of them put together.
        So we should do more to create an environment in which we will be
    more safe, that will help you when you're trying to get kids to sign the
    pledge, when you're trying to solve the conflicts in your schools. I
    also believe it's very important for Congress to pass this hate crimes
    legislation which makes it explicitly criminal to attack people because
    of their racial, their religious, or their sexual orientation. I think
    it is very, very important.
        Now, last night the Republicans on the relevant committees removed
    important hate crimes protection from a bill that had already passed the
    Senate. And they tried to kill this bill when we weren't watching, but
    now we're watching this morning. I want to ask you also to speak up for
    that, and that's the last point I want to make.
        This hate crimes legislation is important because--why? It embodies
    what I think is the biggest challenge facing not only our society but
    societies all over the world. The great thing about the modern world is
    we've got a lot of movement across national borders. A lot of you have
    probably been on the Internet talking to people in other countries. And
    when I look ahead to your future, I see a time when we'll have these
    unbelievable scientific discoveries. And your children, literally, may
    be born with a life expectancy of about 100 years. We're unlocking the
    secrets of the human gene. And you will be, literally, able to not only
    be American citizens but citizens of the world in ways that no one else
    has ever been, even if you don't travel beyond your home county, because
    of the way the Internet is working to bring us together. That's the good
    news.
        The bad news is that the same demons that lead people to commit
    racial and religious and sexual orientation-related crimes and
    discrimination in America are sweeping the world in more violent ways.
    Basically, the conflict in Northern Ireland is a religious conflict. The
    conflict in the Middle East is an ethnic and religious conflict. The
    conflicts in Kosovo and Bosnia were

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    ethnic and religious conflicts. The brutal killings in Africa were
    tribal conflicts. All over the world, people are getting into modern
    technology, but they're behaving as if they lived 1,000 or 2,000 or
    3,000 years ago, because they're afraid of people who are different from
    them still.
        Don't you think that's interesting, that you live in the most modern
    of all worlds, and yet the biggest problem we've got is the oldest
    problem of human society, people being scared of people who are
    different from them? And you can help that.
        I had, last week, at the White House--really my wife had this meeting, and I just went along for
    the ride. But she sponsored this lecture by a man who helped to create the infrastructure of the Internet
    and a man who knows more than nearly anybody in
    America about the human genome project, the breaking down of the
    component parts of the genes, and how it fits in the body. And they
    talked about how we were going to be able to solve all these health
    problems by merging computer technology and what we know about genetics.
        But let me tell you what the genome specialist said. He said--now
    listen to this--look around this room, all the different kinds of people
    that are in this room. He said that 99 percent of us, 99.9 percent of
    each of our bodies is identical to the other. We are 99.9 percent the
    same genetically. Even more interesting, he said, if you take two ethnic
    groups, there are more differences in the gene structures within the
    ethnic groups than there are between the ethnic groups. That is, if you
    take, let's say, a group of Hispanic kids and a group of Asian kids,
    there will be more differences within the group than what you average
    out what the genetic makeup is between the Hispanics and the Asians.
        We're getting a message here. Science is reaffirming what our values
    tell us. And I'm telling you, if you all can do something about violence
    and fear and the compulsive alienation of so many of our young people,
    which turns into their need to look down on people and eventually
    dehumanize them and eventually think it's okay to act violently against
    them, if you can deal with that--it's the oldest problem of human
    society--if you can deal with that, you're going to have the brightest
    future of any generation of Americans.
        You will have a chance to solve diseases, to solve poverty problems,
    to give people potential that they never would have had before. But the
    whole thing can be held down by the failure to deal with our violent
    impulses, which are the product of our most deep-seated fears. So think
    about that.
        If you want to live in the new world of the 21st century, you've got
    to help people get rid of their old hatreds and old fears. We'll do our
    part, and we're very proud of your leadership in doing yours.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:30 a.m. in the Cannon Caucus Room at the
    Cannon House Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to Rebecca
    Hunter, a student from Nashville, TN, who introduced the President;
    Jeffrey Bleich, Executive Director, National Campaign Against Youth
    Violence; Ananda Lewis, host of MTV's ``HotZONE;'' Vinton G. Cerf,
    senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology, MCI
    WorldCom; and Eric Lander, director, Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for
    Genome Research. The conference, entitled Voices Against Violence: A
    Congressional Teen Conference, was sponsored by House Minority Leader
    Richard A. Gephardt and the House Democratic caucus.