Earlier today, there was a shooting at Herritage High School in Conyers, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. Six students have been injured, but news reports are indicating that all will survive. A 16-year-old student has been taken into custody.
As I write this statement, U.S. President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton are traveling to Littleton to meet with students and parents from Columbine High School. While it is appropriate for the president to make this visit, it is now time for the president to declare this a national epidemic and to take decisive action.
Across the United States, schools are in the process of ending their academic year. There have been many "copycat" attempts to outdo what has happened at Columbine -- the most recent being in Port Huron, Michigan, where four teenagers are being charged with planning a similar massacre. We can look forward to more of these copycat attempts as school years wind down throughout the country. A short term solution would be for school districts across the country to increase police presence in schools.
I will also repeat my call for President Clinton to appoint an indisciplinary task force to look at school security, teenagers who are able to acquire automatic weapons and explosives, and disciplinary measures for troubled students. I am now in the process of developing guidelines which I will send to the White House, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Education later this summer.
United States citizens need to continue the dialogue on youth violence
and children committing capital crimes such as school shootings.
I will not get into the moral issues of gun control, violence in movies
and video games, and the like. But I will say that we will need to
make some hard decisions in the coming months before the beginning of the
1999-2000 academic year to assure that school shootings become a thing
of the past.