I know the members of this Congress are concerned about crime, as are all
the citizens of our country. But I remind you that last year we passed a
very tough crime bill--longer sentences, three strikes and you're out,
almost 60 new capital punishment offenses, more prisons, more prevention,
100,000 more police--and we paid for it all by reducing the size of the
Federal bureaucracy and giving the money back to local communities to lower
the crime rate.
There may be other things we can do to be tougher on crime, to be smarter
with crime, to help to lower that rate first. Well if there are, let's talk
about them and let's do them. But let's not go back on the things that we
did last year that we know work--that we know work because the local
law-enforcement officers tell us that we did the right thing. Because local
community leaders, who've worked for years and years to lower the crime
rate, tell us that they work.
Let's look at the experience of our cities and our rural areas where the
crime rate has gone down and ask the people who did it how they did it and
if what we did last year supports the decline in the crime rate, and I am
convinced that it does, let us not go back on it, let's stick with it,
implement it--we've got four more hard years of work to do to do that.
I don't want to destroy the good atmosphere in the room or in the country
tonight, but I have to mention one issue that divided this body greatly
last year. The last Congress also passed the Brady bill and in the crime
bill the ban on 19 assault weapons.
I don't think it's a secret to anybody in this room that several members of
the last Congress who voted for that aren't here tonight because they voted
for it. And I know, therefore, that some of you that are here because they
voted for it are under enormous pressure to repeal it. I just have to tell
you how I feel about it.
The members who voted for that bill and I would never do anything to
infringe on the right to keep and bear arms to hunt and to engage in other
appropriate sporting activities. I've done it since I was a boy, and I'm
going to keep right on doing it until I can't do it anymore.
But a lot of people laid down their seats in Congress so that police
officers and kids wouldn't have to lay down their lives under a hail of
assault-weapon attacks, and I will not let that be repealed. I will not let
it be repealed.
I'd like to talk about a couple of other issues we have to deal with. I
want us to cut more spending, but I hope we won't cut Government programs
that help to prepare us for the new economy, promote responsibility and are
organized from the grass roots up, not by Federal bureaucracy.
The very best example of this is the National Service Corps--AmeriCorps.
It passed with strong bipartisan support and now there are 20,000 Americans
--more than ever served in one year in the Peace Corps--working all over
this country, helping person to person in local grass-roots volunteer
groups, solving problems and in the process earning some money for their
education.
This is citizenship at its best. It's good for the AmeriCorps members, but
it's good for the rest of us, too. It's the essence of the New Covenant and
we shouldn't stop it.