Clinton Asks for Crusade Against Juvenile Violence

Two days after the latest school shootings, President Clinton on Saturday called on Congress and the American people to join him in a crusade to reverse what he called a national culture that “desensitizes our children to violence.”

Taking aim in part at the entertainment industry, the president described the rash of school massacres as “more than isolated incidents” and declared: “We cannot ignore these conditions.”

While conceding that the government cannot go it alone, he urged the GOP-controlled Congress to pass his juvenile crime bill, which would treat some violent juvenile offenders as adults, fund more prosecutors and anti-gang units, ban gun sales to adults who committed a violent crime while under 18 and require child-safety locks on handguns.

Clinton’s plea for his legislation highlighted anew the sharp philosophical differences between Democrats and Republicans over how best to combat juvenile crime.

The GOP proposals, including one bill already passed by the House, are tougher than Clinton’s but ignore prevention programs--a contrast that the president and congressional Democrats are quick to point out.

Clinton made his remarks during his weekly radio address--less than 48 hours after a student in Springfield, Ore., sprayed a cafeteria full of teenagers with gunfire, killing two classmates dead and injuring more than 20 others.

That was the latest in a series of school shootings that began Oct. 1 in Pearl, Miss., and has left more than a dozen students and teachers dead and about three dozen injured.

Clinton said he was “struggling to make sense of the senseless” and was “profoundly troubled” by the “startling” similarities of the tragedies.

They are, he asserted, “symptoms of a changing culture that desensitizes our children to violence, where most teenagers have seen hundreds or even thousands of murders on television and in movies and in video games before they graduate from high school, where too many young people seem unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their actions, and where all too often everyday conflicts are resolved not with words but with weapons, which, even when illegal to possess by children, are all too easy to get.”

The shootings should provide new impetus for legislative action, Clinton said, adding: “We shouldn’t let this chance pass us by.”

About a year ago, the House approved a potentially far-reaching juvenile crime bill that would allow some offenders as young as 13 to be tried as adults in federal court. The measure, which is stalled in the Senate, also dropped most of the provisions sought by Clinton.

On Friday, during a meeting with reporters, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) foreshadowed what may well become a sharply partisan election-year debate on combating juvenile crime.

When asked about how to prevent juvenile violence, he ticked off a wish list right out of the Democratic Party’s “families first” agenda.

“If we were leading the Congress, a long time ago we would have had on the floors of our houses legislation for early childhood education, for early childhood education in the public schools, for after-school programs, for child-care programs, for more teachers in the schools, for repairing the buildings.”

In his radio address, the president also urged all elements of society to get involved.

“When our children’s safety is at stake, we must take action, and each of us must do our part,” he said. “We must all do more--as parents, as teachers, as community leaders--to teach our children the unblinking distinction between right and wrong, to teach them to turn away from violence, to shield them from violent images that warp their perceptions of the consequences of violence.”

A recent Department of Education study estimated that 6,100 children were expelled in 1997 for bringing guns to schools.