Remarks and a question-and-answer session at Hillcrest High School in Country Club Hills, Illinois

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 7, 1994

February 28, 1994

The President. Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here. I thank you for your warm reception, and I do mean warm reception. I'm sorry it's so warm, but they had to put the lights up so that the cameras will put you all on the news tonight. So see, it's not so bad now, is it, what do you think about that? |Laughter~

I want to thank my good friend Congressman Mel Reynolds for arranging for me to come here and to be with you today and for the leadership that he is already displaying in his career in Congress. He is a great credit to all of you here, and I think you would be very proud of the work that he does in Washington. I want to thank your principal, Gwendolyn Lee, for inviting me here and for the comments she made. She told me that her mother made dinner for Martin Luther King, when she was 11 years old. And she said her mother sent me a plate that h had dinner off of, so she sent me into a little room out here to have a snack off the same plate. So you see, even when you grow up you've got to try to do what your mama wants. |Laughter~ I've spent most of my life doing that myself. want to thank Start Nelson for being here with us. I thought she was very well spoken. We knew exactly what she had to say, and she was brief. That makes you very popular if you're a speaker. |Laughter~

Also I want to say I've heard good things about your music program here, so I hope before I leave I get to hear the band play. You guys have got to play a little for me. I also want to thank anybody in this whole student body who was responsible for putting together that statement up there, that letter for me. I every one of you believes that and lives by it, then I don't need to be here, I need to be somewhere else today. It's a very impressive statement and a real credit to your school.

I came here today, as I think all of you know, to talk about the problem of crime and violence in our land and especially as it affects our young people. A the Congress comes back to work this week, it will be considering some very important education bills and some very important crime legislation. We know as a practical matter that we can never really be what we ought to be as a people until we are not only free of the scourge of violent crime but free of the fear of it. For the very fear of crime keeps 160,000 young people just like you home from school every day. Every day that's how many people we estimate don't go to school because they're afraid that if they do go, either at school or going to school or coming from school, they'll be shot or knifed or beat up or hurt in some way.

I know that you understand that because last November two teens were shot and wounded within a week right outside your school. This kind of thing is happenin all across the country, and we have got to do what we can to stop it--you and I together.

The number of teens murdered by guns has doubled just since 1985. You think of that. We've been a country for over 200 years, and the number of our teenagers murdered by guns has doubled in less than 10 years. One in 20 high school students carries a gun to school each day somewhere in America. I hope not here But it happens. Some do it for protection. Some do it for the wrong reasons.

More and more of our young people find themselves caught up in a cycle of violence. I just left the Wright Community College here in Chicago where I met woman whose 22-year-old son was murdered by his best friend in just a fight ove nothing; over nothing they were fighting. And she said when the young man was arraigned in court he said he missed his friend every day. I had another medica professional tell me that she looked into the face of a woman who had just lost her husband because his younger brother went in another room and got a gun and shot him down because they were fighting over which channel they were going to watch on television. And the guy had two little children--people dying over nothing.

I was in California a few months ago, and I did a town meeting--I'm going to that in a minute here, get rid of this microphone and just let you ask me questions--and I was in Sacramento, California, but we were hooked into three o four other towns and people all over the State could ask me questions. And this young man stood up and told a story of how he and his brother didn't want to be in a gang, didn't want to have any guns, didn't want to cause any trouble. And their school was unsafe, so they went to another school they thought was safer. And while they were standing in line to register at this safer school, some half-crazy person came into school and shot his brother standing right there in front of him in the line.

These things are happening all over the country. Today, the Brady bill becomes law. It's a bill that will save some lives. It's a bill that will require that no place in America can anybody buy a gun until they've been checked for criminal background or mental health history. And we know that it will keep thousands and thousands of people from getting guns who would otherwise get them, commit crimes, and maybe even kill with them.