    [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 17 (Monday, May 3, 1999)]
    [Pages 763-767]
    [Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

    <R04>
    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

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    have a culture with too much violence in it for our children, and we
    need to address that, television, 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.

    Parents' Responsibilities

        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

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    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.''
        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.

    Entertainment Industry's Role

        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 and
    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

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    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 thumb print 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 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

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    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. This interview 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.