    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [April 28, 2000]
    [Pages 787-790]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks Announcing a Gun Buyback Initiative
    April 28, 2000

        Thank you very much. First of all, let me say a word of appreciation
    to you, Chief Ramsey, for your outstanding
    leadership of this very fine department. Thank you, Mayor
    Williams, for the energy and direction
    you have brought to city hall and to this entire city. Thank you,
    Eleanor Holmes Norton, for always
    advocating for Washington, DC. I think no one will ever know how many
    times you have called me or been to see me in the last 7 years and 3

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    months to get me to do something else, how many times you have reminded
    me that I, for my tenure here, and my wife are citizens of Washington,
    DC. And I have tried to be a good and faithful citizen, and insofar as
    we have succeeded, it's in no small measure because of you.
        Thank you, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, for being here and for your longstanding concern for
    reducing crime and violence. And I want to thank DC councilmember Sandy
    Allen. And I'd like to say a special word of
    appreciation to our HUD Secretary, Andrew Cuomo, who is here, who has been very, very vigorous in this
    area. I think no HUD Secretary has ever tried to do as much as he, not
    only to build and maintain and improve the public housing units of
    America and to provide more vouchers for people to find their own
    housing but actually to make that housing safe. And I thank him for
    that.
        I'd like to thank all the members of the DC Police Department who
    are here for your service, and I'd like to congratulate this class of
    fine police recruits behind me and thank them for their commitment to
    the safety of this community.
        As Chief Ramsey said, I have tried to be a good partner to law
    enforcement throughout the country. There are a lot of reasons for that.
    By the time I got elected President, I'd been involved with law
    enforcement in one way or another for nearly 20 years. I asked Janet
    Reno to become Attorney General largely because
    she'd be the first Attorney General in a long, long time who had
    actually been a local prosecutor in a fascinating and challenging
    context, in Dade County in Miami. And we got people together who had
    been working with local law enforcement officials to write the crime
    bill in '94 and to pass that Brady bill and to do the other things which
    have been done. And I hope that it's worked.
        Underneath all that, there was something else. I'd actually spent
    time as a Governor and as a candidate for President looking at places
    where the crime rate had gone down. And I found, all over America, most
    people just took it for granted that the crime rate would always go up
    and that all of you who put on a badge and a uniform every day would
    always be fighting a losing battle. That's what most people thought back
    in 1992. And they respected you; they were grateful. They cried when
    they saw the pictures of the children being shot in the newspaper, but
    they basically thought it would go on forever.
        I thought it was intolerable. I did not think it was inevitable, and
    I'd seen enough evidence to know that we could drive the crime rate
    down.
        Now, over the last 7 years, the things we have done together, people
    in their communities all over the country, have given us the lowest
    overall crime rate in 25 years, the lowest homicide rate in 30 years,
    and gun crime alone is down 35 percent since 1993. In Washington, crime
    is at the lowest level since the early 1970's. Gun crime is half what it
    was just 5 years ago. And that's a real tribute to the people in the
    police department and to the people in the community that are working
    with you.
        But as the Mayor said earlier, I don't think there is a soul in
    America that believes that we're safe enough. And when we remember the
    Columbine tragedy, when we experience the tragedy of what happened at
    the zoo here a few days ago, when we pick up the newspaper on any given
    day, we know that this country can do better.
        You know, again I say, in 1992 a lot of people didn't believe that.
    Now--just look at these numbers--we now know; therefore, we have no
    excuse for not continuing to do things we know will work, because now
    we've got the evidence. Yet, 12 young people still die every day from
    gun violence, about 40 percent of them from accidents and suicide.
        Now, as I look ahead--I've asked for a lot of things from this
    Congress. I've asked them to close the gun show loophole, put child
    trigger locks on all the guns, to allow us to trace all the guns and
    bullets used in crimes. I've asked them to ban the importation of large
    capacity ammunition clips, which makes a mockery out of our assault
    weapons ban. I've asked them to give me funds for another 50,000 police
    officers to put them in the highest crime neighborhoods. But I've also
    asked them to give me $15 million, which is not much in the context of
    the Federal budget, to support Secretary Cuomo's gun buyback initiative.
        Now, I want to talk about this a little bit, and this is not in my
    notes, but I think we need to make the sale here. Because I can tell you
    what the people in the media are thinking back there. They're saying,
    ``Gosh, there must be a couple hundred million guns in America. What can
    you buy in DC with a quarter of

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    a million bucks? What's 3,000--I'm glad you got 3,000 guns last year in
    a few days, but what does that mean?''
        Well, the first thing I want to say is, all those numbers that float
    around are misleading. A lot of the weapons are in the hand of law
    enforcement officials, people in the military, and legitimate, honest
    hunters and sports people. The number of guns that are floating around
    on the streets in our cities is massive but not a mountain we can't
    climb.
        And I'm doing my best to get the best data I can, and I'm doing some
    work on that--I was hoping I would have it ready by today, but I don't--
    because Eleanor and the
    Mayor, when I called them after that
    terrible tragedy at the zoo and asked them what I could do to help, they
    said, ``Well, why don't you help our gun buyback program?'' And that's
    why we're all here today, because we want to move now, while people are
    thinking about this.
        But if you just think about this, every one of you knows if you can
    produce 3,000 guns in Washington, DC, in a couple of days, and you pay
    people about $50--they either get a small amount of cash or some sort of
    gift certificate, and then the guns are destroyed--can you imagine what
    would happen if, on a per capita basis, that was done in every community
    in this country? And if we did it a couple of times a year for the next
    2 or 3 years, how much that would drive down all these statistics?
        And that's why I wanted to come here today. When I talked to the
    Mayor, I told him, even though we
    haven't passed our bill through Congress yet, I'd try to go back and get
    some money. And he told me what he was going to do. So I told him, and
    I'll tell you, we're going to give $100,000 through HUD's program to go
    with what the city is putting up. That will enable you, in this few
    days, Chief, instead of getting 3,000
    guns, to get more than 7,000 guns this year. You can more than double
    what you did last year. Every one of the guns taken out of circulation
    could mean one less crime, one less tragedy, one more child's life
    saved.
        Our Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is also committing
    today to trace every gun turned in during this buyback period to see if
    it has been stolen or used in a crime--part of a larger partnership with
    the DC Police Department to trace the source of every gun used in a
    crime in this city.
        So far, this work we've been doing together has proven extremely
    effective in shutting down flows of illegal guns coming in here. In one
    case, officials traced literally dozens of guns, used by gang members
    and other criminals to commit murder and other crimes here in the
    District, to a single illegal gun trafficker who originally bought the
    guns at a gun show in the Midwest where he did not have to undergo a
    background check. But he is now in jail.
        If our budget passes, law enforcement will be able to trace every
    gun and every bullet used in every gun crime. We'll have more local
    anticrime efforts like your Operation Cease Fire here. We'll hire more
    ATF agents and inspectors to crack down on illegal gun traffickers and
    bad-apple dealers, and more Federal, State, and local prosecutors to
    help put violent gun criminals where they belong, behind bars.
        But I will say again, we also need more prevention. Congress should
    help us close the gun show loophole, require those safety locks with new
    handguns, and ban the importation of large capacity ammunition clips.
        Now, if we do all this, are we going to stop every gun crime? Of
    course not. But my answer to those who say, ``Well, if you do all this,
    it wouldn't have stopped this incident or that incident or the other
    incident''--if we had listened to that kind of argument back in 1992, we
    would still have the crime rate going up. We didn't put 100,000 police
    on our streets because we thought it would solve every crime; we just
    knew it would prevent some and solve others quicker. We didn't pass the
    Brady bill because we thought it would stop every person with a criminal
    or other problem in the background from getting a handgun, but we knew
    it would stop some. It turned out to stop a half million. How many
    people are alive today because of that? No one knows, but a lot. We
    didn't ban assault weapons because we thought it would make all the ones
    that were already out there vanish, but we knew it would make some
    difference.
        And that's the way we need to look at this buyback program and every
    single one of these issues. The last 7 years should have proved to you,
    and to every person wearing a uniform in every community in the United
    States of America, that if we have smart law enforcement, smart
    prevention, and committed community involvement, we can drive the crime
    rate down and save people's lives.

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        You are in a successful enterprise, and you ought to tell everybody
    that. Amidst all the tragedy and heartbreak and all the people here
    wearing uniforms who have suffered the loss of their family members and
    their partners and others, you should take enormous pride. One of the
    enormous success stories in the last 7 years--right up there with the
    stock market exploding and the longest economic expansion in history and
    21 million new jobs--is that you proved you could bring the crime rate
    down. And everyone in America is better off because of it. And what that
    means is, we have no excuse now not to keep doing what works and to do
    more of it.
        And I'll tell you what my goal is. My goal is not the lowest crime
    rate in 25 years. I want America to be the safest big country in the
    entire world. And you can do it if we give you the tools to do it.
        So that's what this is about. I want you to go out and prove you can
    pick up another 7,000 guns. I want you to help me pass this program in
    Congress. And then I want us to go out and use this buyback program to
    get local government contributions, State government contributions,
    private sector contributions.
        Look, we can buy millions of guns out there. Just think about it:
    fifty bucks a pop on the average to get millions of guns off the street.
    I don't know about you, but based on the evidence, I'd say it's worth
    it.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 4:06 p.m. at the Maurice T. Turner, Jr.,
    Institute of Police Science. In his remarks, he referred to Chief of
    Police Charles H. Ramsey and Mayor Anthony A. Williams of the District
    of Columbia.