Bill Clinton: “Yes. Two things I might mention. One is that you've probably noticed recently that the Congress passed and I signed the…”

“Yes. Two things I might mention. One is that you've probably noticed recently that the Congress passed and I signed the national service bill, which will, within 3 years, enable us to offer 100,000 young Americans a year the opportunity to serve their communities and either earn credit toward a college degree or, if they are teachers coming out of college, to go into teaching and teach off a significant portion of their college costs, so that the National Service Corps will have a teacher corps component. We work with a program called Teach For America that you're probably familiar with. And a young woman named Wendy Kopp organized it to try to make sure we integrated that into the National Service Corps proposal. So young people in college today, for example, could take out loans under the National Service Corps concept and say, I'm going to be a teacher, in certain areas where there's a shortage of teachers, for a couple of years, and they can wipe off a big portion of their loans. In addition to that, we're making a real effort to try to encourage a lot of these wonderful people who are coming out of the military, as we downsize the military, to go into teaching, to try to encourage them to do it. And we need, I might say, more cooperation from a lot of the States in passing easier ways for them to become certified to go into the classroom. But if you think about it, the military has had a stunning amount of success in educating and training people on a continuing basis. If you go back to what the gentleman said, he was an older high-tech worker that lost his job, and that's the kind of thing that we need in a lot of our schools today. So a lot of these military people are being encouraged to go into teaching and being given, through a special program passed by Congress, some incentives to do that. And I hope we can expand that program, because I'd really like to see it. A lot of those folks are still young, they've got the best years of their lives ahead of them, and they could make a major contribution to the classroom. And a lot of them come from previously disadvantaged backgrounds and from all different races and ethnic makeups. So they can make a major contribution to what we need to do in our schools and our cities. Thank you. Let me just say this, you didn't ask that, but since we've got a lot of doctors here, there is also the National Health Service Corps, which helped a lot of doctors to get through med school but has been shrunk in the last 10 years, will be dramatically expanded if the health care program passes. So you have a lot of doctors in urban and rural underserved areas, too, with the same plan. Mr. Atkinson. Okay, we're going to switch back to KRON in San Francisco. Pete. Gun Control [Mr. Wilson introduced a participant whose brother had been murdered, and he asked what could be done to deter violent criminals who apparently do not fear punishment.]”