No one is more eager to end welfare.

I may be the only President who’s actually had the opportunity to sit in the welfare office, who’s actually spent hours and hours talking to people on welfare, and I am telling you the people who are trapped on it know it doesn’t work.  They also want to get off.

So we can promote, together, education and work and good parenting.  I have no problem with punishing bad behavior or the refusal to be a worker or a student or a responsible parent.  I just don’t want to punish poverty and past mistakes.  All of us have made our mistakes and none of us can change our yesterdays, but every one of us can change our tomorrows.

And America’s best example of that may be Lynn Woolsey, who worked her way off welfare to become a Congresswoman from the state of California.

Crime

I know the members of this Congress are concerned about crime, as are all the citizens of our country.  But I remind you that last year we passed a very tough crime bill—­longer sentences, three strikes and you’re out, almost 60 new capital punishment offenses, more prisons, more prevention, 100,000 more police—­and we paid for it all by reducing the size of the Federal bureaucracy and giving the money back to local communities to lower the crime rate.

There may be other things we can do to be tougher on crime, to be smarter with crime, to help to lower that rate first.  Well if there are, let’s talk about them and let’s do them.  But let’s not go back on the things that we did last year that we know work—­that we know work because the local law-enforcement officers tell us that we did the right thing.  Because local community leaders, who’ve worked for years and years to lower the crime rate, tell us that they work.

Let’s look at the experience of our cities and our rural areas where the crime rate has gone down and ask the people who did it how they did it and if what we did last year supports the decline in the crime rate, and I am convinced that it does, let us not go back on it, let’s stick with it, implement it—­we’ve got four more hard years of work to do to do that.

I don’t want to destroy the good atmosphere in the room or in the country tonight, but I have to mention one issue that divided this body greatly last year.  The last Congress also passed the Brady bill and in the crime bill the ban on 19 assault weapons.

I don’t think it’s a secret to anybody in this room that several members of the last Congress who voted for that aren’t here tonight because they voted for it.  And I know, therefore, that some of you that are here because they voted for it are under enormous pressure to repeal it.  I just have to tell you how I feel about it.

The members who voted for that bill and I would never do anything to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms to hunt and to engage in other appropriate sporting activities.  I’ve done it since I was a boy, and I’m going to keep right on doing it until I can’t do it anymore.