[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 43 (Monday, November 1, 1993)]
[Pages 2157-2159]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
<R04>
The President's Radio Address
October 23, 1993
Good morning. Last year I waged a campaign for President on a
commitment to change our economic course in Washington, to change
economic policy and put the American people first. After a long struggle
we are finally seeing signs of hope in our economy. We have moved to
significantly lower our Federal deficit, and now we have the lowest
interest rates in 30 years. That's bringing back business investment,
housing starts, purchases of expensive capital equipment. And now in the
past 8 months, our economy has created more jobs in the private sector
than were created in the previous 4 years.
We've still got a long way to go. We need more investment, more jobs
that pay living wages, more opportunity for our students and workers to
train and retrain themselves for a changing global economy. We'll never
make America what it ought to be until we provide real health security
for all our people, health care that's always there, that can never be
taken away, that controls costs and maintains quality and coverage.
But we can't do any of those things until the American people really
feel secure enough to make the changes we need to make. I see evidence
of that uncertainty, that insecurity, as I struggle to expand trade
opportunities for our people through passing the North American Free
Trade Agreement; as I struggle to convince people we should open our
markets to others and force other markets open so that we can sell more
of our high-tech equipment around the world;
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as we try to get people to accept the fact that most folks will change
jobs seven or eight times in a lifetime, and therefore we can't have job
security, but we can have employment security if we have a real lifetime
system of education and training. All these changes require a level of
confidence in our institutions and in ourselves, a belief that America
can still compete and win, and that the American dream can still be
alive.
One of the problems in inspiring that confidence in America is that
we've become the most dangerous big country in the world. We have a
higher percentage of our people behind bars than any other nation in the
world. We've had 90,000 murders in this country in the last 4 years. The
American people increasingly feel that they're not secure in their
homes, on their streets, or even in their schools. This explosion of
crime and violence is changing the way our people live, making too many
of us hesitant, often paralyzed with fear at a time when we need to be
bold. When our children are dying, often at the hands of other children
with guns, it's pretty tough to talk about anything else. Today, there
are more than 200 million guns on our streets, and we have more
Federally licensed gun dealers--who, believe it or not, can get a
license from your Federal Government for only $10--than we have gas
stations.
It's prompted the corner grocer to shut down because he feels
threatened. It's made the shopper afraid to enter a parking garage at
night. It's made children think twice about going to school because
classmates have been shot there. It's made parents order their children
inside in broad daylight because of gunfire.
Nothing we aspire to in our Nation can finally be achieved unless
first we do something about children who are no longer capable of
distinguishing right from wrong, about people who are strangely
unaffected by the violence they do to others, about the easy
availability of handguns or assault weapons that are made solely for the
purpose of killing or maiming others, about the mindless temptations of
easy drugs.
This issue should be above politics. That's why I'm working closely
with the leaders of Congress in urging them to pass our comprehensive
anticrime legislation when it comes up in the Senate next week. The bill
is based on a simple philosophy and a simple message: We need more
police, fewer guns, and different alternatives for people who get in
trouble.
We ask Congress to honor the struggle of Jim and Sarah Brady by
passing the Brady bill, a 5-day waiting period for background checks
before a person can purchase a handgun. We want to take assault weapons
off the street. And we want to take all guns out of the hands of
teenagers. We want more police officers on the street, at least 50,000
more. And we want them working in community policing networks so that
they'll know their neighbors and they'll work with people not simply to
catch criminals but to prevent crime in the first place. We want to put
more power in the hands of local communities and give them options so
that first-time offenders can be sent to boot camps and to other
programs that we know work to rehabilitate people who use drugs and to
give our children a way out of a life of crime and jail.
We also are recharting the way we fight the drug problem. Under the
leadership of Dr. Lee Brown, our father of community policing in this
country and now the Director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, we are increasing our focus on the hardcore user, those who make
up the worst part of the drug problem, who fuel crime and violence, who
are helping a whole new generation of children to grow up in chaos, who
are driving up our health care costs because of the violence and the
drug use.
Our program will reach out to young people who can be saved from
living a life of crime and being a burden on society, the ones who've
taken a wrong turn but can still turn around. They'll have access to
boot camps to learn skills and the kind of responsibility that they have
to adopt if they want to turn their lives around.
Every time we feel the need to view strangers with suspicion or to
bar our homes and cars against intrusion or we worry about the well-
being of the child we send off to grade school, we lose a little part of
what America should mean. Some of these problems were decades in the
making, and we know we can't solve them overnight, but within adversity
there is some hope today.
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In our administration, with the Attorney General Janet Reno, our
outstanding FBI Director Louis Freeh, and the Drug Policy Coordinator
Lee Brown, we have a dedicated team of people used to fighting crime,
determined to restore security for our people, determined to give our
young people another chance. We are dedicated to restoring and expanding
personal security for people who work hard and play by the rules. We're
dedicated to insisting on more responsibility from those who should
exercise it. We have a comprehensive crime bill that says we need more
police, fewer guns, tougher laws, and new alternatives for first
offenders. We're asking for a new direction in the control of illegal
drugs to make our streets safer. We're asking all our people to take
more personal responsibility for their health, their lives, and the
well-being of their children.
I believe the American people have decided simply and finally they
are sick and tired of living in fear. They are prepared to reach beyond
the slogans and the easy answers to support what works, to experiment
with new ideas, and to finally, finally do something about this crime
and violence. If we do it together, we'll make America more prosperous
and more secure. We'll have the courage, the self-confidence, the
openness to make the other changes we need to make to put the American
people first in the months and years to come.
Thanks for listening.
Note: The address was recorded at approximately 9:40 a.m. on October 23
in the Oval Office at the White House for broadcast at 10:06 a.m. on
October 23.