[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.