Bill Clinton: “Well, a lot of the younger ones, unfortunately, aren't afraid of anything because they have no sense of the future.…”

“Well, a lot of the younger ones, unfortunately, aren't afraid of anything because they have no sense of the future. They're not invested in their own lives. They're not invested in what they might be doing 2 or 3 or 5 years from now. We're raising a generation of young people for whom the future is what happens 30 minutes from now or what happens tomorrow. And that's a terrible problem. Now, I believe we should have stronger gun control measures than the Brady bill. For example, let me say again what I think we should do. I think we should pass one of a number of good bills that are in the Congress which would ban assault weapons. There are a lot of them out there for the sole purpose of killing people, and they should be banned, either at the national level or in every State. We should follow the lead of the 17 States which have now made it illegal for young people to possess handguns, unless they are, I'll say again, with their parents, hunting or at some target range, some approved place. We should have much stiffer penalties against possessing these weapons illegally. Then every community in the country could then start doing major weapon sweeps and then destroying the weapons, not selling them. Another thing you ought to look into in your area: If the murder weapon is ever recovered, which it may not be, it would be interesting to know where it comes from and what tracking is on it. Because one of the things that I learned when I got into this is that every State of any size has hundreds of gun dealers that may be licensed only by the Federal Government for a $10 fee a year. And there are cities and States which may have other laws, but you can still be a gun dealer if you've got this little piddly Federal permit. So another thing that ought to be done is that the price of getting into the business ought to be raised, and people ought to have to comply with the local laws and not just the Federal permitting laws. All these things would help us to deal with the sheer volume of weapons that are out there in the hands of people that are totally disconnected from our society, while we try to deal with these deeper problems that we talked about earlier. I feel terrible about what happened to you. We have to face the fact that this is the only advanced country in the world where anybody who wants to can get any kind of gun they want to, to do anything that they want to with it. It's crazy. It doesn't happen in other countries, and we better make up our minds to change it if we want to save more lives and not have to see more people like this person on television 5 years from now. Thank you, sir. Social Security [Mr. Moyer introduced a senior citizen who asked why the Social Security earnings limit had not been eliminated.]”