Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much. Joseph and Tina Chery, your son must have been a remarkable young man to inspire such devotion and…”

“Thank you very much. Joseph and Tina Chery, your son must have been a remarkable young man to inspire such devotion and vision, and we thank you. We thank you for your work, and we thank you for your courage and heart in being here today. And we thank you, too, ma'am. Thank you very much. Mr. Vice President, Secretary Rubin, Attorney General Reno, Under Secretary Kelly, thank you all for your good work. Senator Robb, thank you for being here today, sir, and for your leadership. I thank the police chiefs, the prosecutors, the public officials from all across America who are here today, who know better than anyone that we will never be able to protect our children from violence or take our streets back for them and away from guns and drugs and gangs unless we all work together, as Mr. Chery said. In the State of the Union Address, I challenged our Nation to focus on this issue of youth violence. It is a supreme irony that we are living in an age of greater possibility for young people to live out their dreams than at any point in our history, but we are moving into the 21st century with youth violence on the rise, with too many of our children killing children, and too many others raising themselves on the street, and too many others simply vulnerable because they're going about their lives and they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time because we permitted those wrong places to develop and we permit them to continue to exist.…”