Bill Clinton: “Well, as I said, there are a whole lot of different ideas that have been advanced in this whole area, including a much…”

“Well, as I said, there are a whole lot of different ideas that have been advanced in this whole area, including a much better oversight of people who actually sell weapons in the country and a whole series of things on that. That's a question of Federal registration, as well as some State and local registration, too, at least for over-the-counter sales. And there are any number of other issues. Keep in mind, I keep saying we have to do these things one at a time. The crime bill with the amendment by Senator Feinstein which passed the Senate has not yet passed the House. That's a very important step because that will be a measure of the willingness of the Congress to move forward here in banning some of these assault weapons. But another big step will be getting the Federal Government, the Treasury Department, ATF, the capacity to define identical assault weapons that may not be mentioned by name in the law but that are the same thing with just some minor modification to try to get around the law. In other words, there are a whole set of issues here that I believe we have to look at and make decisions on and then set up a set of priorities based on how much we can get done how quickly. On the issue of the registration of either the guns themselves or the people who own them, you know, in the question of automobiles we have both people registered, you know, people have an automobile license, and the cars themselves are registered. And that's all done at the State level, but a lot of the information is in national computers for law enforcement purposes. For example, if someone steals your car today and drives it to another State and leaves it in the parking lot of a shopping center and it's found, the license number could be fed back into the computer, and you could be told within a matter of a few seconds, normally, that your car's been turned up and where it is. So what I am doing now is to ask the Justice Department to work with our staff to analyze all these proposals both on the merits, if it's right or wrong, and secondly, for the details, how could it be done, and thirdly, what should we do in what order. And that's what I'm looking at now. The main thing I can tell you is that we are committed to going further. The Brady bill was a good first step. It will save some lives, especially for people who have established records of mental problems or clear criminal records. But it is nowhere near enough. It is the beginning, and we have got to move forward.”