Bush Takes Aim at Gun Violence

President Bush entered the debate over gun control Monday for the first time as president, proposing a two-year program based on stepped-up enforcement of gun laws, but no significant new restrictions on access to firearms.

The centerpiece of Bush’s plan is a proposal to spend $15 million to hire 113 additional assistant U.S. attorneys to prosecute gun charges. It is a course favored by the National Rifle Assn. and also supported, as a partial step, by a leading gun-control group.

“If you use a gun illegally, you will do hard time,” the president said. “This nation must enforce the gun laws which exist on the books.

“We’re going to reduce gun violence in America. And those who commit crimes with guns will find a determined adversary in my administration,” he said to an audience of about 75 police officers.

Bush’s Project Safe Neighborhoods is intended to coordinate the work of local, state and federal law enforcement. In addition to funding the new federal prosecutors, the $550-million program would help pay for more state prosecutors, investigators, training and community programs.

At least half of the proposed spending requires congressional approval; the rest comes from funds already allocated for law enforcement in the current budget.

Critics complained that the program omits steps that could prevent gun violence, such as licensing and registering handgun owners, closing legal loopholes that allow weapons purchases at gun shows without background checks, limiting handgun purchases to one per month, and requiring safe storage of handguns.

The president’s speech followed a number of Mother’s Day marches that called for stricter gun regulations. A group from metropolitan Philadelphia and southern New Jersey rang a bell throughout the morning near the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where Bush spoke, to commemorate the more than 300 Philadelphians killed by gunfire since Jan 1, 2000.

Bush’s model is a program called Project Exile, begun by federal prosecutors in Richmond, Va., four years ago. Prosecutors there have tried defendants under a panoply of at least 14 federal laws carrying mandatory penalties of five years to life in prison, for crimes involving gun possession.

In the project’s first three years, Richmond’s homicide rate was cut in half, more than 650 guns were taken off the streets, and 326 offenders were sentenced to an average of 56 months in prison, often in maximum-security facilities.

Project Exile has won the support of Handgun Control, perhaps the best-known of the advocacy groups favoring greater regulation of firearms.

But, said spokesman Brendan Daly, “the problem with just enforcement is it doesn’t address the prevention side.

“All the enforcement in the world isn’t going to bring back someone killed by a gun,” he said.

Bush’s program does not address what has come to be known as the gun-show loophole, under which some states permit purchases of firearms at gun shows without thorough checks of the buyers’ backgrounds. During the presidential campaign, Bush expressed general support for tightening restrictions on gun-show sales.

Daly said California’s regulations are among the most stringent, allowing up to 10 days to perform such checks. The NRA which also supports Project Exile, complains that such checks would block weapons purchases at shows, shutting down the exhibitions as well as the sales.

While Bush spoke, another gun-control group, Americans for Gun Safety, began running a radio advertisement in Philadelphia that praised his pledge to step up gun-law enforcement.

But it also said that “felons in 32 states can get guns at gun shows with no questions asked and resell them on our streets. That’s why we need a national law requiring background checks at all gun shows.”

During his approximately 10-minute speech, Bush saluted the 20% drop in violent crime during the 10-year period that ended in 1999, but he said the violent crime rate in the United States remains one of the highest in the industrialized world.

There were 12,658 murders in 1999, he said, adding: “This is unacceptable in America. And we’re going to do something about it.”

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, who accompanied Bush, said the progress of the program would be measured not by numbers of arrests and convictions, but by the net reduction of crime.

Among the expenditures, he said, would be $75 million to help pay state and local prosecutors, $44 million to improve state criminal record-keeping, $19 million for an expansion of a federal program trying to keep guns out of the hands of young people, and $41 million for a program intended to keep guns away from violent criminals.

A bipartisan plan to strictly regulate sales of firearms at gun shows is expected to be introduced in the Senate today by Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).

It would require background checks at all gun shows where at least 75 guns are for sale, and would help states upgrade criminal records. Restrictions would be relaxed after three years if states could certify that their record-keeping was sufficient to keep guns out of criminals’ hands.

But Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) expressed opposition to gun measures that exceed Bush’s suggestions.

“Gun control is something, clearly, that people across this country in many areas are not comfortable with,” he said.

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Times staff writer Janet Hook in Washington contributed to this story.