On the day after a 2-year-old girl died in a shooting believed to be gang-related, President Clinton on Sunday decried a “disregard for life” evident in the violent deaths of children across the country.
The president spoke in east Los Angeles, 2 1/2 miles from where Bianca Hernandez was caught in gunfire that authorities say a group of young men aimed at her mother and other women Friday night in retaliation for a tire slashing.
Clinton traveled to Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church in a poor, racially mixed neighborhood. He contrasted what happened to Hernandez to the dreams of the Hispanic and Asian families who greeted him.
“What we want America to look like is what we see here today,” the president said, “the faces of these children safe and secure, learning and whole, looking toward the future, believing in their lives, living by their values.”
Speaking out recently with increasing passion about crime and broken families, the president a week ago went to the Memphis church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his last sermon and in a speech Clinton declared it a moral duty for all Americans to become involved in the fight against crime.
In an interview last week with the Tribune, the president said he planned to devise a program later in the year that would address the social underpinnings of criminal behavior and attack more of the law-enforcement issues not covered in the crime bills considered by Congress this fall. But he emphasized the ultimate solutions do not lie in Washington.
On Sunday, Clinton pounded the lectern as he told his east Los Angeles audience: “We are doing everything we can to try to give you the tools you need to make your community safer.
“But we have to make up our minds that we will no longer tolerate children killing children, children having guns and being better armed than police officers, neighborhoods unsafe. We can do better, and we’re going to have to do it for all of our people without regard to race or income or region.”
Clinton applauded the Senate for passing the Brady bill, which would require a five-day waiting period for the purchase of a handgun, and for acting on a comprehensive crime bill that calls for adding 100,000 police officers, banning assault weapons and prohibiting the purchase and possession of handguns by juveniles.
The Senate measures must be reconciled with similar but not identical House versions before they are sent to Clinton for his signature.
Clinton has promised to sign the legislation, but he said it can do only part of the job.
“All these things will help, but in the end, my fellow Americans, we have to take our communities back community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, family by family, child by child,” he said in the outdoor courtyard of the church’s school.
Clinton recognized Monday’s 30th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the work he had done to create the Peace Corps, saying, “Think how he would feel . . . to think of all the horrible things that are happening to our young people in this country.”
He also recalled the impact that Sen. Robert Kennedy had worked here in the 1960s with union leader Cesar Chavez to help farm workers in California. “They marched so that these children could have opportunity, not danger, and we have to give it to them,” Clinton said.
Cracking down on crime is only part of the solution, he said. “We cannot repair the troubled wounds of this country simply by making ourselves safer on our streets. We must also give our young people more to say yes to.”
The structure provided by work “is required to organize society” and that is why he is fighting to improve the economy, provide more jobs and create educational opportunities, Clinton said.
He tied those efforts to his work on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the Senate approved on Saturday, and the just-completed Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Seattle.
Earlier Sunday, the president heard stories of survival from a score of Southern California fire victims. They told the president they were pleased by support from relief agencies and volunteers, but they had fears about mudslides and security for what remains of their property.
“This is just a charred reminder of the courage and the heroism of the people of this area who struggled through those terrible fires,” Clinton said.
Clinton’s seventh visit to California in the 10 months he’s been in office underscored the economic problems faced by the country’s largest state and the importance the administration places in trying to resolve them. He plans to return within the next few weeks.
