Remarks at Our Lady Help of Christians School in Los Angeles - Pres. Clinton; Los Angeles, California - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 29, 1993

Thank you so much. It's wonderful to see all of you here today. I want to thank everyone who has made my visit here so wonderful so far, especially all the people in the courtyard behind us who took me through "Christmas in other Lands," gave me something to eat from every land represented. I thank you, Cardinal Mahony, for being here. I thank you, Father Santillan, for the wonderful work that you and others do at this parish and at this wonderful school. I thank you, Gloria Molina, for being my friend and the national cochair of my campaign last year. And I want to thank all the members of the various elected groups who are here today, the State officials, the local officials who care about you and your future, for joining me here today.

There are three people I want to mention who aren't here today because they're back in Washington, and I hope the Cardinal will forgive them, but the Congress is actually meeting on Sunday, only because they're trying to be home for Thanksgiving. But the Members of Congress from this area, Xavier Becerra, Lucille Roybal-Allard, and Esteban Torres all asked me to give you their love and best wishes. I thank them for their support of our administration and for their support of you.

I started out this morning in Pasadena meeting with about two dozen people who lost their homes or whose family members lost their homes in the fire. And I got this interesting little button--I don't know if you can see it--it looks almost like a stone pin from where you are, but it's actually just a button that was burned up in the fire. And a man who saved two other homes but who lost his own, found 50 of these pins. And he and his wife had them on. And from a distance I said, where did you get those pins? And he told me what they were, and he gave me one. This is just a charred reminder of the courage and the heroism of the people of this area who struggled through those terrible fires. I thank them for what they did, and I hope that their decency and courage in an emergency will inspire all the rest of us to do better everyday of our lives. I wish all of you could have been there with me at the Presbyterian church in Pasadena today to see them.

I wanted to come here today because I came here to this community during my campaign for President. I walked the streets of this community. I talked to children and adults. I talked to working people. I talked to people who didn't have work but wanted it. I talked to people who are worried about the violence and the crime, about the pressures on the families and the dangers to the children. And I want you to know that every night when I go to bed in the White House I think of the children of this country, of their future, of the dangers and the problems, of the hopes and the dreams.

We are working now in Washington to pass a bill which will make a big step toward making our streets safer, something that Mayor Riordan ran on when he ran for mayor. If the bill passes, the crime bill, which has now passed both Houses of the Congress, we may be able to give our cities and this country up to 100,000 more law enforcement officers to protect people, to keep crime from occurring in the first place.

Thanks to your Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Senate passed a bill which will ban assault weapons and which bill ban the possession of handguns by young people. And both Houses have passed a version of what we call the Brady bill, which would make people wait 5 days before they get a handgun so we can check their criminal background, their age, their mental health history.

All these things will help. All these things will help, but in the end, my fellow Americans, we have to take our communities back community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, family by family, child by child.

Our disregard for life in this country is seen coast to coast. This morning I got up and read the Los Angeles Times and saw that a 2-year-old child was killed last night because her mother took her on an expedition in which the gang her mother was associated with got in a fight with another gang, and random shooting into their car felled no adult, just a 2-year-old innocent child. In Pasadena, which used to have a very different sort of image, they are gripped, haunted by the thought that three children were killed on Halloween--teenagers. Across the country in Baltimore, the Mayor of Baltimore told me a heart-rending story of going to the home of an 18-year-old child who made it his practice every Halloween to take little children out so that they could go trick-ortreating safely. And they were walking down a street, and across the street a 14-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy were standing. And the 14-year-old had a gun and dared only offense was that he wanted little children to be able to go out and trick-or-treat safely on Halloween.

What we want America to look like is what we see here today: the faces of these children safe and secure, learning and whole, looking toward the future, believing in their lives, living by their values. That's what we want America to look like.