[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 48 (Monday, December 4, 2000)]
[Pages 2943-2948]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on the Anniversary of the Brady Handgun and Violence Prevention 
Act

November 30, 2000

    Thank you very much. It's ironic; I might say that I was not able to 
come and receive the award from Jim and Sarah because I was at Sharm al-
Sheikh in Egypt, trying to stop a different kind of shooting. And I'm 
delighted and honored to receive it today.
    I want to thank Secretary Summers for his work and the Treasury 
Under Secretary for Enforcement, Jim Johnson; the Bureau of Alcohol, 
Tobacco, and Firearms Director, Brad Buckles. I can't say enough about 
what Janet Reno and her Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder, have done 
over these years to forge a serious partnership with local law 
enforcement and to move beyond rhetoric to real policies that would work 
to make America a safer place.
    I want to thank the people here from Handgun Control and the Million 
Mom March and the other gun safety organizations, and the leaders from 
the religious community and the National Council of Black Churches, the 
American Jewish Congress,

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and law enforcement. And of course, especially, I want to thank Jim and 
Sarah for all these years of courage and determination.
    A few years ago, I gave Jim the Medal of Freedom, and not very long 
ago we actually named the White House briefing room in his honor. But no 
honor can possibly repay Jim and Sarah Brady for what they have done to 
give America a safer future. And I'm very grateful to them.
    I want to say, Secretary Summers said that before he became Treasury 
Secretary, he knew about the economy, but he didn't know much about the 
law enforcement responsibilities of the Treasury Department. But 
actually, the work required to have an impact on both challenges is not 
all that different. People ask me all the time; they say, ``You had such 
a brilliant economic team, you know: Summers; Rubin; Sperling; Bentsen. 
What great new idea did you bring to Washington, to economic policy 
management?'' And I always say, ``Arithmetic.'' [Laughter]
    We brought arithmetic back to Washington, and, you know, 2 and 2 is 
4 again. [Laughter] And miraculously, the deficit went down, and 
interest rates went down, and the economy--what do I mean by that? 
Former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo used to say we campaign in 
poetry, but we must govern in prose, which is a fancy way of saying 
ideas matter and policies matter, and rhetoric becomes less important 
than actually what you do and whether it has a solid foundation in fact. 
So when I say arithmetic, it's really a shorthand way of saying we got 
back to clear-headed, fact-based economic policymaking.
    Well, the same thing is true when it comes to criminal justice and 
safe streets. Most people who run for office know that they will be all 
right as long as they talk tough and as long as they say, ``Show me 
another bill to raise the penalties, and I will vote for it.'' And 
because there are all kinds of countervailing pressures out there, if 
you actually want to do something, as we have seen, and because 
Washington is a long way from the streets of almost every city, except 
the one in which we live, people can get elected and stay elected, from 
the White House and the Congress, by having the right poetry, even if 
there is no prose.
    And that was essentially the problem, in my judgment, with Federal 
criminal justice policy. I was--the first elected office I ever held was 
attorney general; 24 years ago this January I became attorney general of 
my State. And to me, this was always serious business, and I never 
believed that there was necessarily a liberal or a conservative 
position. It seemed to me that we ought to do what would work to protect 
the lives of our people, to give our police officers the tools they need 
to do the job, to empower community organizations, and to do what makes 
sense.
    So we started a serious debate almost 8 years ago now about what it 
would take to make America safer. It was a genuine and honest debate, 
and like all debates, it has been marked by a conflict and often, I 
think, by people who forget about the arithmetic of crime control and 
safe streets.
    Jim and Sarah and so many of you had been battling for the Brady 
bill for 7 years. The vast majority of the American people supported it, 
but we all know why it wasn't law. And I have plead guilty before to 
this, so let me plead guilty again. In 1982, when I was running for 
Governor in my State--and I had been elected in '78 and defeated in the 
Reagan landslide in '80 and then trying to get reelected--I endorsed the 
Brady bill--1982, before it was called the Brady bill.
    I said, ``You know, we ought to have a 3-day waiting period. We 
ought to do background checks.'' And I sparked the awfulest firestorm; 
you can imagine how popular that was in Arkansas in 1982. [Laughter] And 
I wimped out, just like a lot of other people have. And I got elected 
Governor, and I went on and did my business, and we did a lot of good 
things, in education, in the economy, and other things. But I never 
quite got over it.
    And I realized that if I became President, I would have a chance to 
talk to the Nation about these issues in a way that no one else could 
and that we had a chance, because of the work that Jim and Sarah had 
done, to actually have an impact and to get this done. And obviously, 
the votes in Congress were there to pass it. But it wasn't just about 
Congress passing the law and my signing it. We also had a genuine 
discussion, a serious effort

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to think about not what the poetry of safe rhetoric, when it comes to 
crime, is but what the prose of hard work would be.
    One of the main reasons I asked Janet Reno to be Attorney General is 
that she had been one of the most innovative prosecutors in a big, 
difficult environment in the United States. Hillary's brother had worked 
as a public defender in one of the drug courts that she set up, that 
diverted thousands of people from prison who were first-time, nonviolent 
drug offenders, but also helped the crime rate to go down because they 
were people who got off drugs; and if they didn't, then they had to go 
to prison. And now under her leadership, we've helped set up hundreds 
and hundreds of these drug courts across America--another part of this 
serious debate about what it really takes to make America a safer place.
    And we've had a world of help. We've had great people in the United 
States Congress, like Senator Joe Biden and many others. We've had law 
enforcement officials, community leaders, clergies, and moms joining 
hands. So this is a safer country than it was 8 years ago. Now the 
cynics say, ``Well, the crime rate always goes down when the economy 
improves.'' That's true. But if you look at past trends, the crime rate 
has gone down more this time and gun crime, as you heard, down 35 
percent, because of the other things that were done.
    The Brady law--we finished the first 100,000 police ahead of 
schedule and under budget, and we're now in the process of putting 
another 50,000 police on the street in the highest crime neighborhoods 
in the country. It is something that I hope will be continued.
    We also had, after the Brady law and the crime bill, in addition to 
100,000 police, the ban on assault weapons and support for the most 
innovative local crime-fighting strategies to keep kids out of trouble 
in the first place. And one of the things I'm really proud of in our 
education budget is, we've gone from funding zero to 800,000 kids in 
after-school programs in America in the last 3 years. And if this 
education budget passes when the Congress comes back next week, we'll 
double that. And make no mistake about it, that's also a profoundly 
important element of this whole debate.
    So America is a different place than it was 8 years ago, in many 
areas, but certainly in the area of crime: crime down 8 years in a row, 
for the first time ever, the lowest overall rate in 26 years; the lowest 
murder rate in 33 years. In addition to the prevention measures that I 
mentioned, Federal prosecutions are up, as well. And today there is more 
good news. According to the latest figures, the Brady bill has now 
stopped more than 611,000 felons, fugitives, and domestic abusers from 
buying guns.
    Now, the opponents of the Brady bill, who are still alive and well, 
said at the time that it would be an enormous burden on hunters and 
sport shooters, law-abiding citizens that wanted weapons in self-
defense, and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. But after all these 
years, we now know nobody's missed a day in the deer woods; nobody's 
missed a sport-shooting contest; and it sure made a difference. It made 
611,000 differences. That means more children are alive; more police 
officers are alive; more citizens are alive; fewer people wounded like 
Jim.
    I'll never forget going to Chicago one day to do an event on this, 
and we did it near a trauma center where most of the people there were 
young people who were victims of gunshot wounds. And the speaker there 
was a local Chicago policeman who went through a very, very dangerous 
tour in Vietnam and never got a nick, and had 11 bullets in his body 
because of his service in the streets of Chicago. I'll never forget that 
guy as long as I live, standing there with all those young kids that 
were going to spend the rest of their lives in wheelchairs.
    Now, this is the record. But I want to say two things as you think 
about the future and I return to the role of vocal citizen. It's already 
been said, but I want to emphasize it again. This country is still too 
dangerous for our children. The crime rate is still too high. The level 
of violence we put up with is still unacceptable. Thirty thousand 
Americans are lost to gunfire a year, about 10 kids every day. That's 
from down from 13. That's really good, but it's still 10.

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    So nobody believes America is as safe as it should be. And if I 
could go back to the economic analogy, I have said for the last year the 
American people ought to set big goals because the country is in good 
shape. And economically, I think one of our goals ought to be to get the 
country out of debt for the first time since 1835, because that will 
keep interest rates down and keep the economy going and help the police 
do their jobs for safer streets. But I think that we ought to say in 
this area that we do not intend to stop working until America is the 
safest big country in the world. We do not have to accept--[applause].
    Now, I want to talk a little today about what I think the next steps 
should be, because I think that's the way we should mark the anniversary 
of the Brady law every year. Every year I think we ought to gather, and 
when I'm not President anymore, we ought to do it anyway--[laughter]--
and I hope you'll have a friendly forum in which to do it here. But if 
you don't, go somewhere else--[laughter]--and measure where you are and 
where you want to go.
    First, we have to make law enforcement more effective in this area. 
So today I'm asking Attorney General Reno and Secretary Summers to build 
on the success of the national instacheck background system to develop a 
new system to enhance enforcement of the gun laws by notifying State and 
local law enforcement officials when felons and other restricted 
individuals try to buy illegal guns. We should be notifying them 
immediately, something that we haven't been doing.
    Second, even as we work hard to keep criminals from getting guns 
through the front door of a gun shop, we should do even more to lock the 
back door by cracking down on illegal gun traffickers. An enormous 
percentage of these illegal gun sales are done by a relatively small 
number of people.
    Secretary Summers just spoke of the national initiative we started 4 
years ago to build on the success of cities like Boston in tracing guns 
seized from young criminals. Today I got the third annual report from 
that initiative, detailed findings on over 64,000 crime guns recovered 
by law enforcement and sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and 
Firearms for tracing. The data paints a clear picture of where juveniles 
and criminals are getting their guns, how they're getting them, and what 
kind of guns they're getting. It shows that kids and guns continue to 
present a serious crime problem; about 45 percent of all crime guns were 
recovered from young people.
    Now, ATF and its State and local partners are putting all of this 
trace information together so that we can identify the gun traffickers 
and get them off the streets. In the last year alone, ATF initiated 
almost 900 criminal trafficking investigations. And now we're going to 
expand these efforts in the coming year to 12 more cities, from Newark 
to Nashville, from Oklahoma City to Anaheim, to find, to prosecute, to 
punish people who pedal guns illegally to our kids.
    Third, I want to ask Congress again to do two things when they come 
back next week. First, send me a budget that actually funds our proposal 
for the largest national gun enforcement initiative in history, 
resources for 500 ATF agents and inspectors, and hundreds more Federal, 
State, and local gun prosecutors. And second, close the gun show 
loophole. Close the gun show loophole in the Brady law, require child 
safety locks on handguns, and stop the importation of large-capacity 
ammunition clips, which enable guns already in the United States legally 
to be altered so that they get around the assault weapons ban.
    Now this, I think, is very important. Where are the American people 
on this? The results are both encouraging and troubling. Earlier this 
month, the voters of Oregon and Colorado, in overwhelming majorities--I 
think 65 percent in one place and 70 percent in Colorado, where they've 
gone through the searing experience of Columbine--voted to approve 
initiatives to require background checks at gun shows.
    Yet, let's be frank, folks. Supporters of these measures are still 
very vulnerable if they happen to be candidates for Congress or running 
for Congress in places where fear can be used to make people think that 
they're for something they're not. And so I want to say to you what I 
have said so many times. I decided that I could probably do this for 
America because I was a Southern white

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male who first shot a .22 before he was a teenager, and that I thought I 
could go out and talk to people about this.
    Janet Reno and I were talking on the way in here about her going to 
a sporting club, when she proposed the gun safety measure as prosecutor, 
and sitting there and spending 2 hours with people. And finally, when 
she left, they were for what she wanted to do.
    Every time we propose something like this, it becomes part of some 
great culture war in America, and it becomes a pretext for fundraising, 
campaigning, getting people to vote against their own interest because 
they're afraid. And I thought maybe I should do this in part because I 
felt like I could talk to the people that were being stampeded in 
election after election. But it's still a real serious problem. All you 
have to do is look around the country and look at the huge disconnect 
between the votes in Colorado and Oregon on the initiative and the votes 
in culturally similar places on specific elections.
    Now, does that mean we ought to fold up our tent and go home? No. 
Does it mean that we have no choice but to try to put an initiative on 
the ballot in every State and get the people who disagree with us to 
spend their money on something that's at least specific? [Laughter] Not 
necessarily, no. But it does mean, if we want elected Representatives 
who come from challenging environments to stand up and vote for things 
that we know make sense, we have to keep working to learn how to speak 
to people who are good people, who were subject to being stampeded. We 
have to look for ways to make the specifics our friend. The facts are 
our friends. If the facts were not our friends, this initiative would 
not have passed 70 to 30 in Colorado, a clearly Republican State. And if 
you ask people to identify themselves out there, most people would 
identify themselves as conservatives, but they dealt with the facts.
    So I just want to encourage you not to stop but to keep trying to 
become more effective by not engaging in the rhetorical wars with people 
who disagree with us, but going straight to the people, themselves, who 
vote, who either vote in these referenda or vote in the elections for 
Congress and for Governor and legislature, and talk to them about the 
facts, because the facts are our friends. Fear is our foe.
    And I think this is so important, because we just can't walk away 
from all this now. We've got a good head of steam going. And nobody--
nobody--has proposed a single thing yet that I'm aware of that would 
keep a hunter out of the deer woods or a sports shooter out of a 
contest. But all these things would make America a much safer place. And 
you just have to keep working at it, and you can't be deterred. But you 
must be, also, effective. And you have to realize that when people get 
scared, they are liable to resolve doubt against you. But when they 
understand what the deal is, they're going to resolve doubt in your 
favor. The facts are your friends.
    So I want to encourage you to do that. Jim and Sarah have shown 
amazing perseverance and courage. They've kept their spirits up. They've 
kept our spirits up. They've battled on against the odds. That's what we 
have to do. But I don't want you to worry about being mad or being angry 
or even getting even. I just want you to understand that you can win the 
battle, but you've got to be smart, and you've got to be willing to keep 
working through setbacks, and you have to be willing to trust the good 
common sense and fundamental decency of the American people.
    If you can get through all the smokescreens and argue the facts and 
if you look over the last 8 years--if someone had told me 8 years ago 
that crime would go down every year, that it would be at a 26- or 27-
year low, that so many more people would be alive, that we'd actually 
pass the Brady law and the assault weapons ban and we'd be working on 
150,000 police, we'd have 800,000 kids federally funded in after-school 
programs, I would have been pretty happy.
    But now, after 8 years, I have to tell you, I still think more about 
the kids that are left out and left behind. I still think more about 
those that have been victimized instead of those that have been avoided, 
because I know we have to keep going until this is the safest big 
country in the world.
    So I implore you--I implore you--do not get discouraged. We know 
what works. We know what the arithmetic answer is, and we

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just have to keep after it. We should be gratified and happy in this 
holiday season that America is safer, but we should be resolved to make 
it the safest big country in the world.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 1:05 p.m. in the Presidential Hall in the 
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In his remarks, he 
referred to former White House Press Secretary James S. Brady, who was 
wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, 
chair, Hand Gun Control, Inc., and his wife, Sarah; and former 
Secretaries of the Treasury Robert E. Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen.