Clinton Calls for Tougher Gun Controls : Government: At ‘town meeting,’ President tells questioner that assault weapons should be banned. He also addresses concerns about immigration, loss of jobs and education.

Pushing an issue that until recently has been on the Administration’s back burner, President Clinton on Sunday called on Congress to pass legislation banning assault weapons and stiffening federal gun controls.

Speaking in a 90-minute statewide “town meeting” in which he was questioned by Californians here and in television studios in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego, Clinton made his call in response to a question from Dion Brown, a 15-year-old whose brother was caught in a cross-fire and shot in the chest at Los Angeles’ Dorsey High School four weeks ago.

“There are several bills before the Congress which would ban assault weapons,” Clinton said. “We ought to pass one. We ought to do it this year.”

Clinton has expressed support for assault gun bans in the past, but had done little to push such proposals earlier in the year. Until recently, he has limited his public statements about gun control to calling on Congress to pass the so-called Brady bill, which would impose a five-day waiting period on gun purchases.

The President said that in addition to banning assault weapons, Congress should pass legislation to prohibit people under 17 from possessing handguns except when under adult supervision.

In recent weeks, Democratic strategists increasingly have seized on gun control--once considered a politically dangerous issue--as a potential tool to reach middle-class Americans concerned about their security. New Jersey’s Democratic Gov. James J. Florio has used his campaign against assault weapons as a key to his reelection bid, which is being directed by Clinton strategist James Carville.

Last month, White House aides were quick to notice that a line in Clinton’s health care speech about limiting the access of teen-agers to guns brought loud applause in the Congress and a strong positive response from focus groups convened to watch the speech. Clinton has been increasingly emphasizing the issue in recent days.

Gun control is one of several themes--including health care reform, worker retraining and deficit reduction--that Clinton has tried to begin weaving together under the general rubric of increasing Americans’ sense of personal security in a changing world.

“We are in a time of great change,” Clinton said at the outset of the town meeting broadcast. “In order for America to make change our friend instead of our enemy, we have to have a certain base level of personal security and family security in this country.”

The prime exhibit in that campaign for greater security has been Clinton’s health care proposal, which would guarantee insurance coverage for all Americans regardless of their job.

White House officials originally had wanted to limit the town hall program to questions about that issue, but over the last several days yielded to objections from the television stations broadcasting it, including KNBC in Los Angeles and KCRA in Sacramento, which hosted the show. According to White House officials, the stations insisted on opening up the show to questions on other issues.

The result was a display of practically every major problem that has figured prominently in statewide public debates in recent months--drugs, crime, loss of jobs, immigration and poor schools.

Clinton broke little new ground on most of those issues--promoting his proposals to increase spending on drug treatment programs and boot camps for first-time offenders, insisting that the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico would generate new jobs for Americans, backing unspecified tougher actions against illegal immigration and touting the Administration’s education proposals.

As he has at such sessions in the past, Clinton demonstrated his carefully honed ability to empathize with people in need--warming to a woman who recently lost a son to leukemia, a man who lost his job because of defense cutbacks, and another who works in a church-based group that fights crime.

Clinton also criticized the idea of using public funds to provide vouchers for private school attendance, saying his Administration’s education proposals are “a better way to go” than the proposed school voucher initiative on California’s November ballot.

The Administration has proposed to redirect federal education aid in a way that would funnel a higher percentage of the money to school districts with the greatest education problems. Clinton has also proposed a coordinated program to set basic education achievement goals that all school districts nationwide would be expected to meet.

Clinton repeated his campaign pledge to appoint judges who support the constitutional right of women to obtain abortions, but left open the possibility that some lower-court appointments might go to people who oppose abortion.

The Administration has under consideration a handful of judicial candidates who have opposed abortion rights in their current, non-judicial jobs, and Clinton said that he would not use a “litmus test” to enforce conformity on that issue. Noting that lower court judges are bound by law to enforce the decisions of the Supreme Court, Clinton said that before appointing a judge, he would “have to be satisfied” that the candidate would “be willing to uphold the law of the land”--including abortion rights.

On another issue of wide interest in the state, Clinton pledged efforts to bolster the Border Patrol and toughen controls on the Mexican border. But he continued to avoid taking a stand on the proposal by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to impose a $1 fee on border crossing to fund enforcement efforts.

Clinton said he was “not philosophically opposed” to Feinstein’s idea, but did not want to “embrace” it until he could be certain of its ramifications. Administration officials have worried that the fee would hurt commerce between the United States and Mexico and cause other potential problems.

“I think we should have more Border Patrol guards, and I think we should do more to restrict illegal immigration,” Clinton said.

During the broadcast, the father of a 12-year-old girl kidnaped at knifepoint during a slumber party appealed to Clinton and the television audience for help in finding his daughter.

Marc Klaas, whose daughter, Polley Hannah Klaas, was bound and gagged and taken from her Petaluma home Friday night, appeared via satellite hookup from San Francisco station KRON. On Sunday, about 50 FBI agents and Petaluma police officers were searching for the girl.