tonight former congressman asa hutchinson delivers the nra report on school gun violence. afterward, viewer calls and comments. after that, representative elijah cummings.

a new report commissioned by the national rifle association says schoolteacher should be allowed to carry firearms if they receive proper training. asa hutchinson says his group working independently of an array did not consider the potential impacts of expanding background checks. this is 45 minutes. >> good morning. i am asa hutchinson and i welcome you to this important presentation to increase school safety. i received a call last december from the nra. they asked if i would be interested in leading an effort on school safety.

we arrived at an agreement which is my mandate. we will not have any predetermined outcomes. we would have the full support to employ the experts to develop a review of our national efforts on school safety and make the recommendations as appropriate. the nra has fulfilled their side of the bargain. they have given us the support needed to reach their product that we are presenting today. there is no guarantee the nra will accept these recommendations. these are the recommendations of the task force. i did want to introduce the

members of the task force that are here today. we're delighted that some of them have joined us. on the first row is ralph -- where are you? over here to the side. former commissioner of u.s. customs. an expert in the field of law enforcement and security. we have a retired colonel, was air force security officer, former joint staff's anti- terrorism and homeland defense director at the pentagon. ceo of phoenix solutions. former deputy assistant

secretary for critical infrastructure protection. we want to recognize some of the other members of the task force that have arrived at this report. i am pleased to release the comprehensive report of the national school shield initiative. this report includes everything from best practices to technology to review of surveillance and includes the recommendations that i will present later in this presentation. for over three months, these

experts have engaged in the assessments of multiple schools of sizes, of composition. they have done assessments and evaluations of best practices and vulnerabilities. have conducted interviews with people knowledgeable in the field. the president of the national association of school security and a commander of school security in the philadelphia school district. thank you for joining us. one of the experts in the field. just offered their basic knowle dge to us.

i want to go through some of the findings from the school assessments. we will present our recommendations from the task force. we will have a comment from a special guest and open it up for questions and answers. i wanted to cover some of the things that we found. we looked at the interior and an exterior doors, architecture and design of the schools. then we look at the armed officers and the staff that may be armed. we believe they make a difference in the various layers of security. we found something very significant. there is really a two-tiered layer of security in our schools.

school officers, technology and surveillance and magnetometers and policy development. then you have the smaller schools, the middle sized schools, those that have resource challenges. they are part of a major focus we will need to have. our recommendations are directed at the schools that are trying to do something with school safety but are struggling with the resources to do it. look at perimeter fencing. you'll see they are not adequate perimeter fencing for a school.

ones that do might not be in proper repair. use the technology to have a single point of access for visitors to check in and to show identification. we find that many of them have surveillance cameras. it might be at the ceiling level rather than at the eye level. look at the doors which are so critical. some of them do not have the hinge coverings to protect the the exterior doors. is there and an anti-carding device?

it is a great tool to provide greater security for our students and teachers. the interior doors and windows in our best practices show some of the state of the art designed for interior doors. the windows so often go around the interior doors. are they sufficient to protect against an intruder. the bus operation. all the buses lined up to pick up the students. there is better practices for how the buses a line so you did not convert it all the students in one place as they load and unload from the buses. we've looked at the personnel badges.

sometimes the badges are not worn. sro training. there is some enhancements in training that can improve not just their training but also their coordination with law enforcement. then the armed security staff. there has been a movement to consider armed security staff. the findings referencing managing threat information which goes to the mental health side of the school environment and whether there is proper collection of threat information and response, whether it is through the action of counselors in addressing any mental health challenge in the schools.

there's a compilation as an appendix to this report. the best practices that we found around the nation reflecting some of the work of the to problem of education and the department of justice and the department of homeland security and appalling that together. in and pulling that together a tool that can be uitltilizied. let me move to the recommendations of our task force. these recommendations have three audiences. first would be the national rifle association for long-term support in the area of school safety, to reflect their strong commitment in that area. second would be to state policy makers. the third audience is the

federal policy makers. our first recommendation is for model training programs. we have presented a model training program for school resource officers that is an enhancement of what they currently undertake an hour required. -- and are required. it is 40 to 60 hours of training. that is an appendix in the presentation. we have prepared a model training program for a selected armed school personnel. this is probably the one item that catches everybody's attention. why is is part of our recommendations?

-- is this part of our recomme ndations? there is the incident in pearl high school in 1997. an active shooter went into the school and killed two students and wounded others. urcee was no school rfeso officer. the assistant principal left the school and went to his truck and retrieved his semi-automatic firearm and return to the school and disarm the the assailants. that is an example where the response is critical. the key is reducing that response time. if he had been trained or had access on his person, he might have saved more lives. and so -- one of the findings of

the team went through one school that did not have school resource officers and they were plotting to arm school staff. when the inquiry was made about what kind of training do you have, it was clearly insufficient training. schools don't have adequate direction on what is a model program for armed personnel. teachers should teach. if there is a person out with good experience and is willing to go through this training of 40 to 60 hours, then that is an appropriate resource that a school should be able to utilize. we have to adopt changing the law so it allows a firearm to be

carried by school personnel when they go through this model training program. we have a model state law that can be considered for this purpose. the third recommendation is an interagency agreement between the law enforcement agency and the school. you heard the concern that police personnel in the school or armed guards in the school somehow increases the episodes of juvenile delinquency and the reporting of disciplinary action rather than treating them as routine school disciplinary incidence.

they need to have clear understandings reflected in a memorandum of understanding between the school and the law enforcement agency. a critical tool, an online assessment tool that is web- based that the schools can utilize that would be on the national school shield website. this tool has been summarized in the document that we are presenting. schools have to hire an expert or they struggle with local law enforcement to develop their policies. this tool is available for any school free of charge on the

website and will not be something a principal can fill out. the school will have to be able to get access and they will be asked questions on access control. does the school enforce it's visitor sign-in and access control? what actions are taken when on authorized visitors are detected? those are a sample of the questions. that helps them understand the gaps in their own security. then they go to the best practices to address the solutions for their security policies. a change in state education policies.

we define in our state education advocacy based on the curriculum the students take. a key part is that they have done a safety assessment and they have a plan that is in place. that is a recommendation for the states. they do something in terms of assessment. the federal policy makers -- we need to have improved coordination and more directed funding. we have three departments of the government that are all engaged in school safety -- education, justice, and homeland security. they need to have a lead agency

with greater coordination. the federal role is greater support for innovation and training grants. the school districts have absorbed the cost and they are prepared to do that. the seventh recommendation is to the nra. the national school shield become an umbrella organization to support school safety across this nation the the free access into the best practices that will be available to the schools and to create pilot programs to fine-tune the assessment tool

and also to look at pilot programs in mental health and to answer questions. we recommend a long-term commitment through the national school shield. we have a specific pilot program on a threat assessment and mental health. the secret service found that 71% of attackers felt threatened or bullied. that is a pre-indicator. chools can teps sho take. we recommend the nss partnering with other partners interested

in mental health and that we can create programs that will be state of the art encouraging information sharing, identify threats and offering counseling support. dations.e the 8 recommen this has been a brief review of them. please read the report. it is accessible online. please give close attention to the appendices that are attached to it. now i want to introduce somebody who is the parent of james who was killed at the sandy hook elementary school, which triggered the national review of this issue of school safety. mark has expressed an interest in school safety and has asked

to make a comment. so, mark? >> good morning. i wanted to take a minute and applaud the task force and the nra for spending the time and resources for putting a program like this together. it is important that everybody recognizes -- we send our children off to school. there are certain expectations and in sandy hook, those expectations were not met. this is a comprehensive program. i think politics should be set aside. i hope this does not lead to name calling. these are recommendations for

solutions. solutions to make our kids safer. i read a report from 2002 which has some great input. what was done at the federal, state, and local level out of that report to make newtown or yorktown safer? -- or your town safer? i put this on you to implement solutions so people do not have to go through what i'm going through. i was on google this morning. nine school shootings since newtown. i do not know that everybody got the press with respect to the impact.

i just applaud you for doing this. i think it is important. look what took place at sandy hook. mental health. that is a big component of this. we need the kids to be safe. they allow for a positive interaction with a lot of law enforcement professional. people knew about what people had in mind but they didn't report it to somebody. we have to prevent this going forward. [applause]

>> thank you, mark. now we would be happy to take questions. yes, sir. >> you talk about training volunteers. [indiscernible] >> is there a microphone around here? >> in terms of volunteers, my impression is there would be great reluctance from school superintendents. we have shifted to school staff, trained school staff that is designated by the school board. there is a discussion for every school district in terms of

sro's and armed school staff and volunteers as well. one is a liability concern. one is a training concern. the issue is addressed in the best practices. the school's all-time elite make these decisions. you ask about the cost of this effort. $1 million by the nra to fund this effort. they have supported it. looking at the support, you can see it it is a substantial investments. yes, ma'am.

>> [indiscernible] >> our whole effort is about school safety. the impact i hope we have is that we talk about things that will keep children safe for in school. these types of programs from the private sector and support from the policy makers. we want the debate focused on school safety. yes, sir? [indiscernible]

>> do you see any common ground to work together? >> well, i help they continue to talk and work together. -- i hope they continue to talk and work together. i have not focused on the separate debate in congress about firearms and how they should be dealt with. when they are seeking common ground, i hope this will be the common ground. there are common sense steps that can be taken by policy makers. president obama supports additional funding on school safety. we recommend that it is coordinated better and is focused. you can open up the biggest chunk -- additional grants

through homeland security to the schools. they can compete with additional dollars. yes, sir? >> recent polling on gun legislation shows more than 80% of americans support universal background checks. why is that proposal not part of your shield? >> my organization is represented in this room. we might have won a few of > ckground checks. >> [indiscernible] >> our focus is on school safety and making our schools a safer environment.

we all want to make sure that criminals, those that had been declared with mental issues, that they not have access. that is a discussion that will go on. we're trying to do something about school safety. >> you would agree that non-sro personnel might be armed inside a school and they should undergo an extensive background check. do you agree? >> that is part of the recommendation. any school staff designated by the school to be a trained, armed response. they would go through background checks and testing and screening and then 40 to 60 hours of training. everybody has a different level of background and experience. that is a very comprehensive

program. anyone designated as an armed response should have the adequate training to accomplish the task and be safe. yes? >> cbs news. you areshow that former likely to get shot if there is a gun in your school. [indiscernible] >> you mean in terms of an accident? one thing you know for sure is the response time is critical. just like the assistant principal that i mentioned. he had to go to is truck to get a gun. if you can reduce the response time, it will save lives. that is the objectives. firearm retention and how they

know how to protect that and to make sure it is properly cared for. that is a key element of the model training program. >> you talk about response time. the shooter in newtown got off dozens of rounds. [indiscernible] >> again, in reference to newtown, what was the first thing the school did after the incident? they got armed officers to protect the children. it was important for the confidence of the parents.

they did not have response capability. you had teachers giving up their lives. we don't want to have teachers to do that. we want to have a better response, to give the schools more tools so they can respond quickly. yes, sir. >> if any part of the national school shield involves coordination with the bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms or a push with the nra to support that? i'm wondering if the atf was involved? >> the agencies we focus on education, home and security, and justice. that has been our focus and not the atf.

yes, sir. >> [indiscernible] response to is that every local school district will make a decision. we have -- i talked him at the philadelphia school district. every high school student goes through a magnetometer. resourcehe school officers in those schools do not carry firearms. i respect that decision.

other school districts want to have an armed response. they want to have a different capability. we are giving them an option. if you're interested in making the schools safer and to save children's lives, look these recommendations seriously. the presence of an armed security in a school is a layer that is just as important as a mental health component. if you have the armed presence without locking doors, it is inadequate. without having access control -- it is a comprehensive plan in which the armed school personnel is one element. yes, ma'am.

>> does your report show how many armed personnel would be needed at a school? what do we do about recess? when kids are outside and not in the school? >> excellent question. there is no specific recommendations on how many sro's or armed personnel is in a specific school. john? >> not specifically for the school. make sure you're looking at the entire posture of your school, your building, the number of students. >> it will be up to the school to determine the level of resources. an sro in every school building is important.

right now you have sro's rotating between maybe three campuses. i would judge that insufficient. there should be at least one and every school campus to reduce response time. >> would you review the relationships between the school and the nra? >> the relationship between -- ok. the relationship -- i am employed as a consultant that leads this task force in which i have asked each of these experts to independently look at the issue of school safety and to make these recommendations. whether this is unanimous?

everybody has signed off on this report. there is probably a lot of different political leanings and different viewpoints that are reflected. there is a unity of opinion when it comes to these recommendations on school safety. >> [indiscernible] >> it is important that they be trained with the firearm that they carry and utilize. they have to practice with that.

there is no specific recommendation on that. it is everything from and sidearm to shotgunned to ar-15. a shotgunsidearm to to an ar-15. there is a variety of weapons that are utilized by the school officers based upon their local leadership and what they determine is best for their environment. you ask a question about the presence of security. >> [indiscernible] >> go into a mall there is security. there is security here at the national press club. >> [indiscernible]

>> there is nothing i am afraid of. i'm very wide open. there is nothing i'm nervous about. yes, ma'am. >> is it the conclusion that every school in the united states should have an armed presence? >> the specific findings is the presence of an armed security personnel in a school adds a layer of security and diminishes response time that is beneficial to the overall security. we recognize that the decision is locally made. some school districts decide not to go that direction. we want to make sure our

resources are available whenever decision is made. i come from a rural state. the smaller school districts struggle. they cannot afford a school resource officer. they are looking for options. this is a key tool to provide more options for school security and safety. yes? >> what is the average cost to train one of these -- to maintain them every year? >> mic, please. can you come up here? tony. >> the program is about 40 to 60 hours. the average cost is somewhere around $800 to $1,000 per student.

would provide ammunition equipment and things like that need. there is not set cost right now that we of the attached to the program. we have made the recommendations but we're not attached a price to that. when i say student i mean student in the training programs, not students in the schools. i apologize. >> thank you for clarifying. >> last question. >> how does it cost the school how do you justify paying for that? >> you justify it because it is necessary. there is reference to a school resource officer might cost $60,000 in one jurisdiction and

well over $100,000 in another. it varies. the trading costs should be a more constant. -- the training costs should be more constant. how does a school justify it? look at the armed school personnel. the cost would be for the 40 to 60 hours. then the training cost itself. there's a lot of different ways the trading can be accomplished by the states. it would be by professional private sector trainers. it could be by the law

enforcement entity in the state. we want to make sure it is accessible and we have as many traders that are properly trained as possible. that was a follow-up. last one. >> [indiscernible] others say they want to eliminate assault style weapons and high ammunition magazine. >> that is the sandy hook report you are referring to? >> [indiscernible] >> i would be interested in what connecticut is doing for school safety.

i will cite it is totally inadequate. >> because? >> you can address assault weapons and it doesn't stop somebody bringing in a .45 caliber firearm into the school. it doesn't stop violence in the schools. you have to do something about school safety and enhancing our safety measures in the school. it can be done. that is the purpose of this task force. thank you for your work in this. it is our hope the nra will accept these recommendations. that this will be a long-term commitment by the nra to be a national leader in school safety. thank you for your attendance today.

just a moment we will give you another view on gun control legislation. ahead of thek senate returning for a debate on proposed gun control legislation. he thought we would stop for a couple of minutes and get your input on the gun control debate. gun controlore legislation? we are opening up our phone lines for your views. here are the numbers. the question is -- do we need more legislation? michael is a white house correspondent for the new york times. he joins us from washington.

both the president and the nra are waiting for the senate to return for the debate next week. they are firming up their position this week. what did we hear today? what did we learn from the nra? >> both sides are kind of waiting and. ing in.hgi they released a study which is elaboration from the past. they want to increase the number of armed personnel in schools. they laid out a plan that they said would involve more training for teachers and administrators so they can use those weapons safely and in a variety -- in a variety of other suggestions built around the idea that rather than gun control insures, we need more guns schools as a way of preventing the tragedies we saw in your town. >> asa hutchinson said he

personally viewed the support of background checks even though he did not speak for the nra. that is likely to be one of the sticking points next week. >> it is more than just a sticking point. it is a debate that it is boiling down to that. one.e can look at this which iseapons ban sort of the marquis of this , no one thinks that is possible in congress. there are a bunch of little things that folks can do and are talking about, such as gun trafficking laws and other things. really it comes down to a debate over background -- expanded background checks. sons make it universal amount of where you buy a gun, gun show, from a friend on the street, a licensed gun dealer,

any time you purchase a gun you have to go through a background check to make sure you are able to buy one. the president will be back out on on the road talking about gun control. you will be traveling with the president to denver. he will be speaking at a police training academy. what is the goal in colorado? >> it has been this way for several months. the president and the white house believes the best that is a public shaming campaign. he made remarks last week that by saying,motional we cannot forget the victims of newtown or aurora. down the street from where the theater massacre happened a while ago. he will be traveling to connecticut to make the same speech.

they will say we need these pieces of legislation of a background check. you do the bully pulpit to make that case. >> the assault weapons ban is off the table. the background check being a real feature. do they want to propose limits on the size of large capacity magazines? is that still part of the debate when the senate returns? it is.nally there will be some folks that will talk about that and will press for that. i think most people who are watching congress believe that is a non-starter. that will not go anywhere. it is associated with assault weapons ban, which people have sort of written off at this point. there are mental health

databases and making sure that people with mental illnesses do not have access to gun. debates likely to be a whether it starts next week or the week after. there will be a debate on the floor of the senate. that will largely revolve around background checks. >> as you talked to administration folks and people at the white house on this issue, what is your sense of the best the hope or out of the senate legislation? i have spokenook, to some high-level folks about this topic. , butnk they are hopeful somewhat resigned to the idea. they will not get everything they want. the emotional power of newtown -- they recognize that it has receded somewhat. some people i talked to today were talking along the lines of,

look, you have to judge us not by some 100% ideal of everything you want, but rather can we move the ball? can we get some tough gun restrictions? .et something they will take that if they can get it. >> michael shear, covering the white house from the new york times. you can follow him on twitter. thank you for joining us. >> happy to do it. >> we will open up the phone lines and hear from you. do we need more gun legislation? your tv when mute you call in. democrat line. that we do not think need too much more. it is pretty decent where we are at now, but we should, like, a little bit strict with it.

host: what specifically would you like to see stricter? like -- ings host: and dependent line. welcome to the conversation. guest: thank you. i'm a gun owner and i support gun rights. sitting there and watching people talk about bringing more weapons inside the school, to me, i was aghast. i worked as a prison guard before. i worked in situations where you bring in weapons. bringing in weapons with people , toare trained -- to me hear them say that, it is ludicrous. it appalled me.

host: we go to bed republican o to the republican line. at our locallice high school are generally there anyways. we should not have too problem with it. thank you for your call. checking some threweets. of americans one universal background checks. -- we willh responds give obama universal background checks at the first against as universal voter id. from another -- lawmakers reach a deal on nation's toughest gun control legislation.

another says -- without background checks, how do nra and republican suggest we makes are mentally ill do not get guns question mar? democrat line. guest: i'm actually a gunshot victim. i was shot by some in who i thought was my friend, but he has been in out of jail for most of his life. he got a gun off the street. host: how long ago was this? guest: two years ago. october 2010. i believe we need more legislation, especially as it whoains to going after guys have violent criminal backgrounds. if they get their hands on a gun, there are are not getting it to go hunting with. they get it so they can hunt someone. guy that shot you,

you say he got a legally out the street. what kind of legislation would prevent that? guest: he has been caught numerous times. he has one of his cases in indiana from a gun case or whatever. .e had been in in jail that was not the first time he was caught. they slapped him on the hand and led him right back out of jail. because of that gunshot? guest: yes. host: he is in general? guest: yes. -- he is in jail now? guest: yes. but maybe it gun laws were stricter, he would be in jail and i never would have gotten shot. host: president obama heading to denver tomorrow. we will have live coverage of

that here on c-span. beginning at 5 p.m. eastern tomorrow. wrote thispost evening about what is ahead. to praise colorado state lawmakers wednesday, calls on congress to follow theiw." again, tomorrow president obama 5 p.m. eastern in denver. independent line. hi. guest: how we doing? host: doing fine. guest: we have had a multitude withtions from presidents the firearms act all the way up .o ronald reagan signing these gun laws are not doing anything.

these democrats and anti-gun owners talk about education, but they do not want to put any education firearms in the kids in school. it is a well-known fact it's education work so well like they say it does, if you work very well on children in school and teaching them the things they should look for and not look for. if the teachers feel they need this, i have five children in school. two are in college one in high school one in middle school and one in elementary. theseng that can deter things -- and approves that guns are out there. guns are proves taht out there. they rarely talk about firearms protecting people. they always talk about crime. they never talk about when perpetrators are stopped with a

firearm. >> dear children schools have appropriate safety measures? children schools have appropriate safety measures? guest: if someone in my family has access to a firearm, they can resolve a issue. host: thank you for weighing in. talk guns in connecticut on monday. the latest on his road trip to put issues of gun control proposal. he has a delivery speech on monday in hartford. he will ask americans to join on calling on congress to pass commonsense measures to reduce gun violence according to a white house official. cleveland, ohio. republican line. what do you think? are gun laws need it? guest: no way and no how.

i think with the nra has put ogether would be a great no matter what -- if somebody has an illness and their plan is to go in and kill a bunch of people. they can take a baseball bat. they can do just as much damage before they are apprehended. it's not -- it's not the answer. somehow we do need to get guns out of the hands of criminals. >> a couple more calls and we wanted to show you the comments from the briefing at the white house with jay carney. here's what he had to say. >> every element of the package

100%. forward he supports it is a starting point to insist they all get a vote, the legislative pieces of this. it would be appalling, in his view, if the memories of the victims of newtown and other thee were forgotten through process of filibustering on measures that the american people expect. whether they agree or disagree, they are to vote on them. these are tough issues and we talked about them in out parts of the package. at the very least, we need votes on these. those elected and sent to washington they need to cast a vote and say where they stand. the president thinks they are making an impationed case, the

vice prosecutor is out there doing the -- vice president is out there doing the same. other leaders engaged in that. we understand and the president has made clear that there are regional differences on some of these issues and there are things that we need to engage and recognize and make part of the discussion. the vice president's process did that. conversations that the president had with lawmakers who have, you know, who have an interest in taking common sense measures but have strong backing in their support for the second amendment. the president understands all of this and he understands this is part of the process. he insists that we act. host: you can watch that briefing on our website c-span.org. let's go to king in north carolina. this is kristin.

caller: i believe the government will not completely take our gun was. there's nothing wrong with regulating them. we have the right to bear arms. what is the matter of having a background check on someone who might with at risk. i think it's ok that the government should know who is at risk harming anyone. host: to sacramento, california, on the independent line. carlos welcome to the conversation this evening. caller: hi, how are you doing? i understand the n.r.a. because they are in it for the money, in my opinion. but to put a ban on all assault weapons, i mean that would solve the problem. host: you're calling for a ban on all assault weapons? caller: yes. host: what is the law in

california on assault weapons? ? caller: i'm not sure but i know you can get a hold of assault weapons if you go go to a buyer rdealer. and actually, i see the other side with the n.r.a., they are making money. so that would be to their interest to put armed guards in schools. but i think to ban all the assault weapons and they can pull -- poll from state to state and have the state have a choice to talk to the legislations. host: california senator dianne feinstein tried to get the assault weapons ban in the senate bill but the majority leader is saying it won't be part of the legislation. let's check a couple of the final tweets. here's one looking at the

president's trip. this is from brad who says tomorrow the president will use your tax dollars and try to put gun control on the front burner. we already voted gun sense in the late 18th century. this is from jerry i'm a survivor of a home invasion thanks to firearms and an older brother. i'm for crime control not gun control. >> gun control what adam lanza's home arsenal looked, only loans have this much fire power. dan on the republican line. go ahead. caller: yes, my name is dan. i'm just saying all the regulations they want to put on gun control are for people who are legitimate gun buyers. they already have passed background checks.

any time you buy a gun you have to pass a background check. before you walk out of the store you have to pass a background check. i don't understand where this ew back checked is coming from -- background check is coming from. any time i had to buy a gun you have to pass a background check. host: what about -- i think a lot of this has to deal with private sales and gun shows. have you been to a gun show where you purchased a firearm, for example? caller: yes. i've been to gun shows and every license dealer that i had to deal with, yeah, you have to go through the same background as everybody else. caller: and the same with a store? caller: yes. if i went anywhere -- if you purchase a gun they call your

name in, your social security number, the whole nine yards. when it comes back that your background check is fine and it is ok for your to purchase firearms then you're ok to purchase that firearm and you can leave with that firearm. anything else comes out you're not able to leave. host: i don't want to put you on the spot, but what you're saying if you go to a gun show, generally, you get an instant background check there at the show like a licensed dealer and you walk away with that firearm that day if it is cleared that day? caller: yes. every time i weapon to the gun show -- a lot of volunteers fire departments will it, if you get a firearm that day, when you go up to claim your prize, they

have to make a phone call. they do the whole background check before you leave that place with a gun. if you don't, you have the opportunity of taking the cash or you can't have a firearm that day. host: thanks for sharing your experience with us this evening, dan. thanks for all the calls. the hashtag and we're following the conversation on twitter is gun control. don't forget we'll have the president in denver. he's talking about his gun control proposals and the senate action. that will be live 5:00 p.m. wednesday here on c-span. the ranking democrat on the house oversight and reform committee talked about his gun control proposals. gun control proposals that was released in 2011 when he lost his 20-year-old enough few to gun violence. a proposal that is calling for

reducing gun trafficking. his is just about an hour. ok, so we will begin. welcome to the national press club. happy easter and passover season to everyone who celebrates those. and happy spring. will the sdeurksd world's leading organization for journalists and, as we say, the place where news happens. my name is bob wiener. today we are honored to have congressman elijah cummings of baltimore, presenting it a reality check on congressional gun legislation. the representative is a ranking member of the house oversight democratic reform committee. the congressman is the former chairman of the congressional

black caucus. now with more than 100 co-sponsors on gun tracking legislation. he takes the gun safety issue personally and points to his nephew, 20, murdered by a gun shop when he was a student. despite projections of prompt action in the newtown, conn. massacre, including 21st -- 20 first graders. president obama insisted in his state of the union address that victims of mass gun violence deserved a vote. president obama designated joe biden, including an assault weapons ban, limits on magazine capacity, and mental health monitoring and assistance.

he will discuss the state of congressional action and substance of the gun tracking legislation as well as other pending bills. the representative represents maryland's seventh district. he is a member of the joint congressional economic committee. thank you to your staff. he is congress's leader on drug policy, which is how i met him nd first work for him in the white house drug office, where they incidently admire the congressman enormously. elected in 1996 after serving in the house of delegates for 14 years, he was the first african-american in the history of maryland and to be named to the second highest office.

he states he has dedicated his life to uplifting and empowering eople. congressman will speak for 20 to 25 minutes followed by questions. ariel? if you could stand up? a student at the university of ennsylvania in a course called dealing with the media will actually deal with you and take the microphone around and make sure you do not abuse the privilege of the questions, k? so please identify yourself. identify your name and organization. questions but not speeches,

please. i also want to thank richard mann, right here. thank you. my staff also assisted. and the staff of the national press club, as well as the "newsmakers" chair, and congressman staff, sophia immons, jennifer hoffman, jean roscoe, jimmy fine fernagain. jimmy? >> yes, you got it. > and carlos [unintelligible]. it seems that someone to treat gum legislation as an april fool's joke. or they want to wait until the next massacre to bring attention back to it. today "the washington post," the lead story is pro-gun targeting key bills. i am going to read the first three paragraphs.

"gun control measures that seemed desperate to become law after the school shooting in newtown, conn., are under jeopardy after the lobbying campaign from gun advocates. senators have been unable to find support within the system for background checks, something nine out of 10 people support. gun trafficking a federal crime could be gutted if lawmakers except new language being circulated by the national rifle association. should we not all be utraged? so, clearly the congressman is a leader in the field and one that we must year from today. the national press club is the place where news is made and today we are so thrilled that you are here to do it. congressman elijah cummings.

>> thank you very much, mr. wiener for your kind introduction. i am indeed honored to be here his morning. it is always a present -- a tremendous honor to be in the presence of my wife, i would like to thank her for being here today as well. today i want to talk about an issue that is extremely personal for me and my family. that is the issue of gun iolence. in june of 2011 i lost my nephew, christopher. lost him to a senseless act of gun violence. christopher was just 20 years old. he was a student at old dominion university in norfolk, virginia.

like the beautiful children who lost their lives at sandy hook, he was an amazing young man with his entire life ahead of him. it is a painful thing to see your nephew, your son, or your daughter, to see their blood splattered over walls and couches, or wherever they may have been killed. like countless others, i was living to the unimaginable suffering of losing a loved one due to gun violence. the pain that i feel in my heart today, even these years later. last week during a press conference urging the country not to forget the massacre in newtown, the president was joined by mothers who are

fighting the legislation to reduce gun violence. let me tell you, i fully understand their passion. i fully understand their pain. i also fully understand their purpose. because when you lose a family member like that, you just do not mourn them at their funeral. you mourn them every single day of your life. you mourn for the person they could have been. for children murdered at five years old, six years old, as they were at sandy hook, you mourn every missed a birthday, every graduation, every christmas, and that is right, very easter. every milestone list is a reminder of the life they could

have led had they not been so cruelly and violently stashed way. not only are we morning we lost, but remembering what could have een. this loss leads to great passion. but it just does not lead to great passion in family members. it leads to great passion in those who hear about these incidents. those who were the neighbors and friends of these children. those who went to church with hem. the passion is deep and owerful. i am thoroughly convinced that that passion must be to change. -- need to change.

we will keep fighting for gun safety legislation. i will be fighting for that legislation until i die. i want to start today by talking about our fight against the problem of gun trafficking and straw purchasing, which i have been working on for several years. the bipartisan forum but i organize last month included first responders and law-enforcement officials who were victims of gun trafficking rimes. far too often it is our brave law enforcement officers and first responders who find themselves on the wrong end of a gun barrel. want to share some of their stories with you today, lest we never forget. we need to constantly remind ourselves of these stories so that they are printed within the

dna of our brains as we debate the gun issue. ne of these brave men is ted suffered multiple gunshot unds when his unit was theponding to a fire alarm on fire alarm, the fire, turned christmas eve. out to be an ambush set by a name -- a man named william spangler, a convicted felon who served 17 years in prison for killing his 92-year-old grandmother with a hammer. despite his history of violence, spangler convinces neighbor to buy the 12 gauge shotgun and bushmaster rifle that he used to murder two firefighters and injured two others, including mr. scardino.

here are the pictures of the two firefighters that lost their lives that day. 19-year-old thomas [unintelligible]and his mentor, might chiapperini. he left behind -- mike chiapperini. he left behind a wife, two young daughters, and a son. that is the reality check. they are no longer with us. hey're dead. we also heard about the loss of one of his own officers in pennsylvania. fficer fox encountered and her

thomas, a convicted felon who swerved into oncoming traffic -- andrew thomas, a convicted felon who swerved into oncoming traffic. or some reason a straw purchaser willingly bought seven handguns and two rifles for this killer, even though he was a convicted felon. something is awfully wrong with hat picture. officer fox was only 34 years old. he was one of our heroes. he was in iraq war veteran who returned home as a hero. he left behind a pregnant wife and a daughter. that is the reality. the chief told us that he was like a son to him. at the forum we heard from a san rancisco police chief.

the chief described a gun trafficking ring that stretched from georgia, rural georgia, california. it involved hundreds of firearms. as a matter of fact, the chief told us that a lot of people who are convicted felons there are looking for ways to be legally make money. instead of going into drug crack -- drug trafficking, the going to drug trafficking -- gun trafficking. he was concerned that we needed a dedicated law to address this gaping loophole. many of these firearms, by the way, wind up in the streets of he bay area. they are recovered at crime scenes across oakland and the bay area. including those areas including armed robbery suspects.

ne of them fell into the hands of a convicted felon. multiple gang members and drug traffickers. ladies and gentlemen, let's be clear. his problem is everywhere. it is not just sandy hook, not just baltimore, not just a rural georgia. just last week there were reports of another straw purchasing incident in colorado, which i am sure that you heard about. a convicted felon shot and killed colorado possible prison chief and a pizza delivery man. -- colorado's prison chief and a izza delivery man. the shooter was on parole after east -- serving four years in prison for punching a prison guard in 2008.

now, most americans already think that gun trafficking is a federal crime. i have news for you, it is not. they have no idea that there is no federal law targeting firearms traffickers who use straw purchasers to buy guns for convicted felons and other dangerous criminals who cannot legally buy guns on their own. in congress we have heard repeatedly from law enforcement that the law to prevent straw purchasers, and this is their words, not mine, that they are viewed as nothing more than paperwork violations similar to getting a ticket for going 65 in a 55 mile zone. again, not my words, those are the atf and police words. after years of working on this issue and hearing firsthand from law enforcement officials that they needed congress to

strengthen gun trafficking laws, i join my republicans and democrats in february to introduce gun trafficking prevention acts for 2013. this common-sense legislation will put a first time explicit prohibition on firearm trafficking, making straw purchasing a serious crime by increasing the maximum penalty to 20 years in prison. i am grateful to have significant support from law enforcement officials all over the country. nearly 30 organizations support the bill, including law enforcement officials throughout he nation. these officials believe that this legislation it is very critical to combating firearms moving to criminals, cartels, and other dangers people.

the bill also enjoys significant bipartisan support in the house of representatives thanks to the fall leadership of rep scott itchell. -- scott rigellpatrick me hand, carolyn ,maloney, they joined me in introducing this legislation. bipartisan support for the legislation grows every day. we have now surpassed the house of representatives. the legislation also has significant bipartisan support within the senate. it was passed by the senate judiciary committee with the support of republican ranking members, charles grassley, with the support of republican senators off the committee as well. this week, after months of work, the full senate will vote on this critical legislation.

then there will be time for the house to act. i hope the house judiciary committee act to begin the process of marking up legislation so that the full house can vote on a package before summer. i know that we still have a long way to go before the president and sign this legislation into law. but it will be a tough fight. but it will be a fight worth ighting. we have so much on our side. we have common sense. desperate need. most importantly, we have the driving passion of thousands of families who have been victimized by gun violence.

the vast majority of americans believe that congress passed legislation to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. i know that both the president and vice president share of the passion for reducing gun violence. for the first time in decades the white house made preventing gun violence a top priority. just last week the white house held a press conference on this issue. but we will never forget those who lost their lives because a gun man decided to pull the trigger. as the president said, " we are proposing -- what we are roposing is not radical. it is not taking away anyone's gun rights. it is something that if we are erious, we will do it. now is the time to turn heartbreak into something real."

now, i have been asked apart from our gun trafficking bell whether i support other gun related legislation, and the answer is that i do. for example, i believe that fixing the background check system is one of the most common sense actions we can take to prevent criminals from getting guns. i think that would complement our gun trafficking legislation very well. background checks would prevent many criminals from obtaining guns. the anti-trafficking legislation would impose strong new criminal penalties on those who try to get around the system. for myself, i have chosen to focus primarily on gun trafficking legislation, because it is an issue i have been working on for several years. i have worked painstakingly with both democrats and republicans

to slowly build a bipartisan coalition behind this bill. i strongly believe that when people understand what this bill does, they will support it wholeheartedly. in fact, even the nra has come around over the past several months. there are only two groups that still oppose this bill. let me say that again, there are only two -- that still oppose this bill. criminals and people who want to uy guns for criminals. if congress had passed this universal background check legislation, we will have made substantive reform to reduce gun violence across this great ation. we are not done yet. but i believe that if we work

together and work hard and we focus on our common purpose, our common purpose of protecting our families from gun violence, then we will have succeeded. no parent, not one, should have to send a child to school, be it sandy hook or old dominion, and wonder whether he or she will make it home alive. our country is better than that. we are better than that. in america's inner cities, suburbs, and small towns, gun murders take more than 11,000 american lives each year. more than three times the number of americans that lost their lives during the decade-long war in iraq. that is the reality. we must make these deaths by gun

violence transformative. as a nation we must help to heal the families who have suffered so much. part of the healing process for me and for countless other families is to prevent other senseless deaths from gun violence from occurring again. we are the congress of the united states. we must be vigilant and put arty politics and rhetoric aside, taking protecting american families and future generations of our priority. this is our watch. this is our watch. to borrow the words of the great martin luther king, he said the be must substitutes courage for ost. -- caution. for passing meaningful gun legislation as soon as possible."

one last word, when i think about the many young people who have died, i think about the children in sandy hook. i think about the mass shootings we have heard about and seen on our television sets, the ones that you have written about. i do leave with all my heart that we survivors do not have the right to be silent. we do not have the right. with that, i will take questions. >> ok, i will monitor questions. stay here with us. ou have to reach far down. i am going to lead off the questions and ask the moderator

to ask if, the politics of this issue, with 90% of americans upporting your measure and the background checks, in fact are there not more parents concerned about the lives of their kids than leaders of the nra? not even the membership, which by a majority supports these measures. what are the politics that allow the nra to transcend and have a story like in today's open "the washington post," that your bill will be gutted and inserted with new language? what are the politics around that? how can we reverse it? are we going to lose the opportunity unless american selectively pay and not attention? -- pay not attention?

>> i am so pleased that you will all have a in a few minutes an opportunity to ask wayne pierre ppear. -- up here that question. i cannot answer that question, because i can only speak from my own reality. i do believe will all my heart that when you have 20 children murdered, little children, imply learning how to read run, spot, run," getting ready for christmas and somebody comes

in and murders them -- i said in my speech that there are certain transformative moments that happen in all of our lives. if that does not cause folks to step back and say that we need to look at the way that our country is operating and say that we need to do something about gun violence, i do not know what will. i will be interested to hear what the nra has to say about that. let me say this, having lived in politics as lawyers i have, one f my greatest concerns is that these arguments go back and forth and we wind up doing nothing. we wind up doing absolutely nothing. do believe that when you have these moments, they are pregnant with opportunity to make a

difference. and if we do not act in those moments, then things will likely nly get worse. you will not hear me beating up on the nra. i want to work with the nra to bring about meaningful legislation so that we get something done. i want to deal with the bottom line. do we get something or don't we? do we have legislation, or don't we? the arguments will fade into the universe. the question is, have we accomplished anything. i would put that on to mr. lapierre. >> all right, are you ready? start in the back.

identify yourself and your rganization. traw purchasers, -- >> straw purchasers resulted in the deaths of one u.s.-mexican border patrol agent. would your bill prohibits the federal government from participating? >> clearly, first of all -- yes, and other words it was wrong. everyone said the reason it was wrong. the legislation would address that issue. >> in the front? >> you talk about these transformative moments. but there have been a number of them. a congress woman was shot in the ead.

s it really different? doing a crime bill in the late 1980's in texas, a shooting in scotland in 1995, repealing the assault weapons ban in the house. perritt why would this -- why would this be different? >> 5-year-old children. i do not know if any of you have children, but the idea of sending a 5-year-old to school and then someone walks in and murders them, i think that that -- in other words, every life is precious, whether it is a 100 year-old or a five year-old, but you can learn something.

i'm glad you asked that uestion. i believe that -- i wish that all legislators could go and do hat i did last friday. one of the things i try to always do is make sure to feed my passion. what i mean by that is that i tay focused on my job. about one week ago i -- two weeks ago i called our medical center in baltimore. i asked if i could come and see n autopsy. i wanted to see an autopsy of someone who had been the victim of gun violence.

after about one week, a case came up and he allowed me to see it. i wanted to be reminded of how serious this thing was. i had an opportunity to see a young man, the age of my nephew, who had been shot in the ead. i looked at him. a very healthy young man. i watched the autopsy. i do not know if any of you have ever seen an autopsy. t is not pleasant. i am glad that we titled this will be titled it. what is it?

reality check. this young man the day before was probably sitting getting prepared for easter. his was a human being. who had friends and probably a irlfriend. who has a mother and father. the reality is i am looking at a ody. it has gone through the autopsy process. we need some reality checks. do not know what it is. i do not know, i do not know hat has to happen.

i do believe there are wonderful people, the n.r.a. people who are trying to do the right thing in their judgment. people concerned about the issue of gun violence are trying to do the right thing in their judgment. there has to be a way to make these things come together and make sense so that folks do not have to witness that. i am convinced that it can be one and it must be done. people say -- do you have ope? just because you do not get every single thing the one, i learned this as a legislator, you just keep pushing and pushing. hopefully the difference is what we're talking about.

of course you would step back and hear about that. perhaps again that would be the question to ask. >> second row? >> alito caldwell, associated press. the language proposed by the nra would increase the evidentiary requirements. making an already difficult crime to prosecute that much more difficult because there is not a federal trafficking law. is that something that you would accept? >> i think that'd waters down the bill tremendously.

ccording to what i read in the post, it appears that they are not solid on the language. it is apparently a draft but i would hope that our friends in the any -- nra would consider hat. i want to be effective and efficient. we have laws that are meant to keep people who are convicted elons from getting guns. it would seem that we would close the loopholes with regard to that. that is justologic cal.

mr. lapierre said something not lock ago when he was talking about this bill and i want to quote him because i don't want to misquote him. he said we're working on laws to beef up -- it was on "meet the press" a week or two ago. he says we're working on laws to beef up penalties on straw purchases and illegal trafficking, which we want prosecuted. look, we are 5 million families. law-enforcement families and trainers. "we want to make people safe. that is what we do every day." i did not say that. the nra said that. if that is the case we should be able to come together and create

some common-sense legislation that is effective. i'm hoping we will be able to do that. we will have to wait and see. >> could you tell us about the status of legislation to put restrictions on am unises and magazines. > as you know, the leader of the senate has said that he does not know if he has the votes to do what he needs to get that legislation up. he says he has opened up a door

for it to be put before as an amendment. personally, i would love to see limits on magazine clips and assault weapons. but at the same time i want to make sure that something gets done. we can argue this and argue hat. and we would do absolutely nothing. we have to be absolutely careful of that. to her credit, senator feinstein has done a phenomenal job and i have tremendous admiration for er and her efforts, but at the

same time i think what is happening is that they have a determination and we will have to see how it goes. > in the back? > robert, from wjla. just a quick question, it has been made clear in the past, the point that was made today, a proposal made to congress even on speculation for the state changing laws about armed guards on campuses. your perspective out -- on armed guards on campuses? >> having more guns in schools is not necessarily the answer. with all due respect, i think that any jurisdiction that wants to take care of their kids in that way, their students, it may not be a bad proposal.

we still do not know exactly all the details. i assume that that is what he will be talking about in the next few minutes. keep in mind that gun violence is not restricted to schools. we have malls, movie theaters. in my neighborhood, the eighborhood i live in. schools are one thing, but we have to look at it in a general scope. i have an area in my district, howard county, which has guards in schools, certain schools. talking to the guards, they tell

me that the greatest benefit is intelligence. in other words, talking to the kids, learning what might be going on. things that nature. so, i do not know. but i would not just throw that suggestion out the window just as i would not want them to toss " we are trying to address here. it is a way to accomplish some good things and i would hope that they would take a look at those things and not do things o water them down. > back to the front.

>> going back to the high support for the proposal, the like the universal background check. when you said that the bill has more -- >> co sponsors. >> yes, in congress. i was thinking there is more than 500 members of the house. ith a 20% level of approval of makes me believe that the congress is responsible because you are blaming the n.r.a. but there is hard support among the people in this country for this type of legislation. would you say that -- using your own words that congress is not

as effective and efficient in the gun issue? >> 435 members of the house, 100 members of the senate, just to get the numbers right. > that is a lot. ost legislation may not even have 1/5 of that. my point is that the number of co-sponsors does not necessarily equal the number people who support the legislation, you get hat i am saying? i think that we have, as a congress, a duty to look at this problem very carefully. i think that when we have a responsibility to reach other to ome up with meaningful

regulations, like those happening in our urban areas every day, one of the things about this legislation, and i want you to understand this, a lot of people don't understand how important this trafficking ssue is. what is happening is we have cases where as i said in my speech where folks are convicted felons. they are trying to figure out how to make money and supply their gang members with guns. there are a lot of cases where we have had testimony on his. convicted felon gets someone to buy guns. one gentleman's girlfriend

purchased 64 guns in rural georgia in a manner of months. those guns were sent to oakland, sold and distributed, the next thing you know they are showing up at crime scenes. that is happening all over the country. according to testimony we have eceived, gun trafficking has become one of the crimes du our. the problem is that we do not have the necessary dedicated gun trafficking federal statutes to close that big hole. we cannot always buy back in the arious cities.

the guns are constantly flowing into areas all over the country. we want to make sure that we do everything in our power to stop t. members understand only two people would be against this. the criminal and the person who wants to buy the gun from the criminal. i do not know anyone else who would be against it. >> let's go the left over there. we're giving you a workout today. >> thank you for doing this today. he said you had spoken to many congressmen over the years on this issue. what keeps coming up? can you generalize the major

things to keep coming up? the resistances to your roposals that seem suitable. >> you know, i think -- i cannot ay one particular thing. i've seen the reaction to the n.r.a. in reguards to our republican co-sponsors. i think that the nra, not telling you anything you don't know, has put forward significant efforts to put orward their position. people would say that that is a consideration. others i assume are looking at

possibilities, but i believe that there is a way where you are do it -- dealing with something of this significance as something in your brain, the kind of pain and suffering that comes out of this issue. that it is on the side of what s right. by the way, our constituents are pretty much convinced already. talk about gun owners who say talk about gun owners who say that they believe that background checks would be supported at 90%. people who actually have guns feel strongly about these measures.

theome way the role that mayor of new york has played has been significant in trying to give folks a push to remind to come up with reasonable to investigate the problem, at the same time making clear she puts it in the home. balancing that out to make sure that folks understand that's we are not trying to take away their guns, but at the same time you want to demonstrate so that things like sandy hook do not happen.

>> [inaudible] project home base after [inaudible] >> be more explicitly, are you frustrated by the fact that democrats in the senate have not moved on this? thisou concerned that legislation could be slipping away? >> a great question. i -- you know, frustration -- i am not frustrated. because i believe that everything has its moment. i think that the cases being -- keep in mind that we were at a point where we could not even have this discussion a year ago.

i may not have even been invited to the press club. but here we are. this is about moving the ball up court. scoreot know if we will two points, three points, or more. it may be that we laid a foundation to do even more in the next congress. the fact is that the passion that comes out of the parents from sandy hook, the passion that people that you and i know about in baltimore from those who have suffered so much gun violence, the passion that comes to me and others, i do not get frustrated because my

about frustration is that sometimes you can get so caught up in the frustration that you get distracted from your goal and i always try to keep my eye on the prize, to make a difference. thinkize is that when i about a young man who is lying there dead, with a bullet hole under his year on the side of his head, that is my passion. i believe that if he could speak, he would say that congress does not have the right to remain silent.

and that we need to keep it in mind. folksof people look at who have suffered from gun violence and say -- they are the crusaders. but one thing that they do not think about and tend to forget, that they are acting out their pain and they have turned it into passion to carry out a person. but you still keep pushing on. by the way, this is the gun. they're doing it so that it does not happen to other children, so that it does not happen to other young people.

two other folks, like the teachers in sandy hook. ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. >> congressman, as we conclude, thank you for the sharpness of your time. we have been yelled at for going too long. we have a very informative presentation and we would like to present you with this traditional national press club mug. thank you for coming. by the way, yes, we would have found another reason to ask you. [laughter] >> thank you, all. >> we are now adjourned. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] >> president obama continues his push for stricter gun control laws with a visit to colorado on wednesday, speaking at the denver police academy about the newly approved gun control measures. see his remarks live, starting

at 5:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> coming up on the next "washington journal," alan gives an update on creating a comprehensive immigration legislation. then, a former immigration and naturalization service commissioner who is now with the migration policy institute. later, the spotlight on magazines features lisa of " pacific standard." "washington journal" is alive every morning at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> so she was out there before respectable women did not do -- this is a new era. this is a time when the women's movement is under way. his current -- interestingly

enough, someone like julia tyler sort of fits in to an extent. a very conservative in some ways, but in terms of breaking through the traditional way that a woman should behave, she is doing it in a way that other women are not. >> our conversation with historians on julia tyler, the second wife of john tyler, is now on our website. on c-span, a news conference with secretary of state john kerry and the south korean prime minister. then, former goldman sachs employee on the wall street culture. later, another chance to see is a hutchinson as he delivers the nra report on gun violence in schools, followed by maryland congressman elijah cummings speaking about proposed gun legislation. >> secretary of state john kerry

met with the south korean foreign minister today at the state department. they held a news conference to discuss issues including threats from north korea. from the state department ben franklin room, this is half an hour. >> good afternoon. it is a pleasure to welcome the foreign minister here today in washington. it is his first visit here to washington, and my first visit with him as secretary of state. we are both delighted to start off this way. two very close friends, countries that have traveled a very interesting journey together for 60 years now. we celebrate this alliance. for decades, the united states and the republic of south, the republic of korea have worked side-by-side as allied. we have stood up to a wide range of challenges over that

time frame, not just in the asia-pacific, but in other parts of the world as well. when you look back at our commitment to democracy, to human rights and rule of law, it is no wonder that we have been such natural partners. our alliance, which is in this moment of its 68 anniversary celebration -- 60th anniversary celebration remains critical in asia and it is a linchpin of peace and stability in the region. the united states is completely committed to deepening this relationship in the years ahead. that is one of the reasons i will be visiting seoul next week. and the president of korea, of the republic of korea, will be

here to meet with president obama in early may. today, we discussed all the issues that you would imagine we would, and even more. we covered a great deal. but i will start with north korea. we heard an extraordinary amount of unacceptable rhetoric from the north korean government in the last days. let me be perfectly clear here today. the united states will defend and protect ourselves and our treaty allies, the republic of korea. the foreign minister and i also think it is important to stay absolutely focused on our shared goal of a peaceful korean peninsula, free of nuclear weapons. and we agree that improved relations between north and south would ultimately help us toward that goal. new is a stated goal of the president of the republic of

korea, and we look forward to working with her to achieve that goal. we also discussed our collaboration on global security issues. south korea has done great work on the un security council helping to curb civilian casualties in combat zones. and they have done that work not just in the far east, but around the world. south also grateful for korea's continued commitment to reducing iranian oil imports. this has not been easy. it is at a cost to their economy. it is difficult. but they have played their role and done their part in helping to have an impact on trying to change the behavior of iran. iran knows exactly what it needs to do in order to address international concerns about its nuclear program.

nextn start doing so weekend in al-madadi at the p-5 plus one talks. we also discussed ways to work more closely on the humanitarian crisis in syria. and i thanked the republic of korea for their support on humanitarian concerns in that area. we also shared an initiative on sub-saharan africa, and we thank them for that. in terms of bilateral issues, the foreign minister and died both want to promote the smooth implementation of u.s.-korea free trade agreement. this agreement is good for both countries and it will strengthen our broad economic ties. it will spur growth. it will help to create jobs in both countries and regions. we also had a good discussion on the bilateral civilian nuclear agreement. we have a long record of close

collaboration on this issue. we are committed to fighting -- finding a workable, and expeditious way forward. finally, we are also both deeply concerned about addressing the problem of climate change. we discussed that. we will have further discussions when i go to seoul next week. we both support clean energy balad. will be looking for ways to work closely -- energy development. we will begin looking for ways to work closely together as we look at the issues of climate change over the course of the next few years. productivery meeting. i hope, the first of many in the years ahead. mr. minister, i look forward to seeing you again in a very short timeframe. and i thank you for your commitment in this important partnership. and i thank you for coming here today to prepare for the import meetings of our leaders in early may. thank you.

>> thank you. good afternoon. i wish to thank secretary kerry for his invitation. we had an excellent meeting today. we discussed a wide range of key issues, including our reliance -- our alliance, north korea, and our agenda. this year marks the 60th anniversary of the caribbean- u.s. allies put in korea, 60 years symbolizes -- the korean- u.s. alliance. in korea, 60 years symbolizes the arrival of wisdom. in this regard, we share the view that the visit in may for president park, which will be your very first overseas visit as head of state, will be to bring our lines to a new height. the secretary perry and i pledged to make every effort to ensure -- secretary kerry and i

pledge to make every effort to ensure the summit is a success. we discussed the situation on the korean peninsula, including north korea's nuclear testing well as the series of threats from the north. we need to further strengthen credible and robust deterrence. in particular, the secretary and i discussed the progress made with the standard deterrence and the provocation plan. i reaffirmed my government's strong commitment to work closely with the united states on north korean policy. both secretary kerry and i agreed that north korea should

abandon its nuclear ambitions and rhetoric. we also agreed to collaborate to ensure full implementation of the un's secret council resolution 1324. i also reiterated my government's policy of building trust. i also emphasized that president park's new policy to promote peace and cooperation in northeast asia is in line with the united states policies for asia, and that a mutually reinforce each other. as we reached our anniversary, but secretary perry and i will work -- secretary kerry and i will work toward the smooth implementation of the agreement.

my government has a strong commitment to open the economy and free trade. moreover, we wish to strengthen cooperation in the fields of science and technology, space exploration, and change. thefinally, i stress importance of revising the agreement in a timely and mutually beneficial manner. i am pleased with the results of this meeting. i look forward to welcoming secretary kerry in seoul next week. we will continue our commiseration. thank you very much. >> we will take four questions today. very. secretary, thank you much. i would like to ask you what you think north korea's intentions

are. do you think this is just bluster? specifically, the recent threat to restart its nuclear facility. and is there a danger in not taking these threats to seriously, that it might provoke them into actually doing something? or is there a chance that they could pull back and be ready for diplomacy at some point? mr. foreign minister, the six party talks in the whole process has always relied on china to rein in the north, if you will. it does not seem likely that the north is listening to china in any meaningful way. i'm wondering if you think that this is a safeguard that the parties cannot rely upon any more. as the influence that china has had been used up? >> regarding china's goal, basically, what we thought with the recent reduction of the un

security council resolution, china is now very cooperative. clearey have made very that they will fully implement the resolution. regarding the six-party talks, actually in this resolution, the six party members and the members of the council also made it clear the six party talks are still a very useful tool to implement and make efforts toward the denuclearization of the north korean nuclear weapons program. we believe the six-party talks should continue. >> i will not speculate on what the intent is or whether there is a strategy or not. the bottom line is very simply that what kim jong-un has been

choosing to do is provocative, dangerous, reckless, and the united states will not accept the dprk as a nuclear state. and i reiterate again, the united states will do what is necessary to defend ourselves and to defend our allies, korean and japan. we are fully prepared and capable of doing so. and i think the dprk understands that. that said, no one takes lightly, least of all the president of the united states, what has been happening. which is precisely why the president made the decision to redeploy missile defense with respect to the united states itself, as well as to take other preparations in the region, and to send a very clear

signal to our allies and the north alike that the united states will defend our allies and that we will not be subject to irrational or reckless provocation. but, and here is an important but, we make it clear and consistently that the united states believes there's a way for north korea to rejoin the community of nations and make it clear that they want to pursue a peaceful path. they can come back to the table and join all of those other countries, including their nearest neighbor and partner china. obviously, the shared in u.s. -- the shared nearest neighbor is the republic of korea. but china has an important role to play. ad has always maintained closer relationship to the north than any other country.

they have an option. and that option is to enter into negotiations for denuclearization, which is china's policy also appeared and began to focus on the needs of their people -- a policy also. and begin to focus on the needs of their people, which we have always made clear we will help them with, if they bring it in line with the global requirements. we will proceed thoughtfully and carefully as the president has indicated, but we take nothing for granted. and we are also not indifferent to the meaning of the risks involved. >> do you believe they will restart their nuclear facility as they threaten to do? >> the first of all, if they restart their nuclear facility, that is in direct violation of

their international obligations. that in itself would be a breach of international standard requirements. it would be a provocative act. and completely contrary to the road that we have traveled all these years upon the agreed framework forward. we will have to wait to see what happens with respect to that, but it is a direct violation of international obligations and would be a serious step. >> next up, -- >> the first question goes out to secretary kerry. right now, a lot of people are interested in the negotiation of the u.s.-korea civil nuclear agreement. several people are concerned that if they request low enrichment for people perk -- for peaceful purposes and it is

not accepted, that there could be in repressions. do you see progress happening in this area? >> president obama and the united states welcomes south korea's emergence as a peaceful nuclear leader. we're working on a civil nuclear agreement that will build on a very strong nuclear energy cooperation that we have enjoyed for literally over 50 + years. notee no reason that will continue. in an agreed upon fashion. the foreign minister and i had a very good discussion about that agreement. we discussed some ideas and i will follow up on those when i visit seoul in about a week.

i'm very hopeful. i think the foreign minister shares this hope, that it can be resolved before the visit of president park. but we're quite confident that this is a relationship that can and will continue in its proper form. >> mr. secretary, in cairo last month, you from afpak $250 million in additional support for the marcey government, following pausch for the morsi government on the promise that he would make more reforms. since then come -- prosecuted more satirists than those involved in crimes. last week in baghdad, you spoke of the need for iraq to more closely monitor flights from

iran to syria. the government there has said this weekend that it will do that. have you seen any evidence of that so far? >> with respect to egypt, and we share a very real concern in the obama administration about the direction that egypt is apparently moving in. this is a key moment for egypt. it is really a ticking. -- a tipping point for egypt. and we have been working in the last weeks to try to reach out to the government, to deal with the imf, to come to an that will allow egypt to begin to transform its economy and improve the lives of its citizens. we share with everybody concerned about the political and economic challenges.

and i communicated those concerns with everybody when i was there. i met with the civil society. i met with the opposition. i met and talked to members of the business community. and i met with members of the government. we have put a series of very real choices to the government of egypt, but in the end, they have to make those choices. the imf is going there this week. there will be discussions with them. but it is only fair to say that president obama and the administration share real concerns about the direction that egypt appears to be moving in. it is our hope that there is still time to be able to turn the corner. but the recent arrests, the violence in the street, the lack of inclusivity with respect to the opposition and public ways that make a difference to the people of egypt are all of

concern today. president obama would make it clear to everybody that the united states went there, as i said, not to support any one person, and certainly, not to support one party over another, but to try to help the people of egypt to realize the dreams that they expressed in to rehr -- and to rehr square. and the dreams that they have tried to put into reality with the election and through faith in the democratic process. i think there's still time for that to be delivered, but in the and, if the government of egypt and the people of egypt that will make that decision. >> iraq and syria. >> with respect to iraq, i am encouraged that prime minister maliki responded to our request with respect to the flights from iran into iraqi airspace and then to syria.

we are working right now with the government on several things. one, we are working on the question of how those might take place and how frequently. number two, we are working on s andg to bring the kurd discussionher in a that can bring people back together and get the democratic process back on track. there has been a real breach of that with respect to kurds. the president has not visited baghdad in two years. the sunni feel as if they have been pushed away from the governing process. ,emocracy is hard is hard work particularly for people who have not experienced it ever or

recently. we all need to work closely together, which is with hopes the prime minister will make the right choices to bring people together, to offer people a united election when it takes place in a few weeks and to offer people the democracy that americans invested in so heavily with their treasure of their young men and women who gave their lives and with a large amount of american taxpayer dollars. >> last one today. >language] -- [speaking foreign language] korean peninsula peace process, my question is, do you have any questions -- any plans on

suggesting -- for instance, reopening the tourist isits. my question going out to secretary, ever since you member of the senate, i know you've emphasized the importance of dip low macy and dialogue. this was one of your standing principles. i know you spoke about that kind of principle when dealing with the north koreans. under what circumstances, situation with the united states be prepared to resume dialogue with the north koreans? do you have any specific conditions in mind in order to resume dialogue with the north koreans? if you have any plans on sending a special envoy to north korea? >> first of all, the situation on the korean peninsula -- it is

critically important for the u.s. and south korea to enhance ts defense capabilities. we will always speak -- we will address, in case of north korean provocation. if north korea decides to give up its nuclear ambitions and be a member of the international community, we are prepared to resume talks in terms of putting in place of peace process on the orean peninsula. >> north korea needs to make it clear that they are prepared to have a serious discussion about denuclearization. they know exactly what the goal is. they know exactly what the terms are. we are prepared. president obama has said

repeatedly we are prepared to enter into a dialogue and negotiation if they are serious, if they will stop the provocations and engage in serious discussion. we have always said that we would like to try to resolve the problems of the entire peninsula. that means making peace, but aking peace does not involve having a nuclear north and disadvantaged republic of korea to the south. they know very well what the terms are. with respect to the question of the envoy, we have an envoy. the ambassador is appointed already, he is here. if the circumstances are correct to, when north korea issues an indication that it is serious about trying to resolve this issue. i would just say this, i think it is important, we face this

danger, at not just to the republic of korea, but a danger to the entire region and the world, of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. and we face in respect to iran. president obama could not have been more clear in respect to both. his policy is the denuclearization of north korea because that is the only way to begin to end the conflict and create safety in the region. the last thing the world needs is more nuclear nations at the very time the nuclear nations are trying to reduce their current numbers of nuclear weapons and control this anger. we face the question of iran. iran knows very well it has an opportunity this weekend. the iranian people are great people. they have a long history.

many times longer than the united states of america. thousands of years. they have an ability to rejoin the community of nations to get out from under this isolation if they will choose this simple ways of proving, as other nations prove, that they have peaceful nuclear energy. t's that simple. it is not complicated. our hope is that that initiative can began in earnest this weekend where we will have a team prepared to negotiate and in the days ahead, we can reach another -- an understanding that will move us. trying with respect to the korean peninsula to make the world safer. that is what this is about. we have no ambitions there. think they know that. we want to see a peaceful community of nations trading with each other, working to

improve the lives of their citizens and that is in direct contrast to the north, which thousands of political prisoners, tradespeople and the most inhumane way, -- treats people in the most inhumane way, nd starves their people. that could not be a bigger hoice. that is the choice we're standing here parening to the nations who have made the choice. >> thank you very much. >> coming up on the next "washington journal." allen gomez gives an update on bipartisan efforts in the house and the senate to create comprehensive legislation.

later "washington journal" potlights on magazines examining the debate over fracking. "washington journal" is live every morning at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> wall street executive greg smith resigned from goldman sachs and wrote an article critical of the lack of clients' focus. he speaks about why he quit and the ethics at the wall street firms. this is just over an hour. >> this event is co-sponsored for the center of ethics and society, which has a year-long

seminars on the ethics and wealth so there are other parts of the seminar series that you might find interesting. so this is something that may be of interest to you going forward throughout the year. before we get started i want to say a few things. first of all greg is due at the bookstore at 6:00 p.m. so if you have detailed conversations you want to have with him that might be the appropriate forum for that. this is being recorded for c-span so this is for future brad cast on c-span. cast on -- broad c-span. we have microphones. greg will talk for about an a half and hour and once you get questions head to a microphone head and he'll call on you.

he graduated from here in the class of 2001 and immediately went to work for goldman sachs. as you probably know from reading "the new york times" reresigned last march in a high profile way that a lot of people argued about and a lot of people at the business school argued about. the core point he was making was at it because greedy type of firm and but greg's argument that had changed in the operation of goldman people were more focused on their personal success or the success of their sub unit or the profits they could make in a short run. o this is a topic that was controversial and i hope we can have an interesting dialogue

between greg and the people in the audience who probably have all sorts of different views to this question. welcome back to stafford and we elcome what you have to say. >> can everyone hear me ok? is that a yes. like the professor said the first time i ever came to america was the day i arrived at stay ford. so i associate the school with a lot of great things. it is great to see a lot of familiar faces. so for the students i was sitting where you were about 15 years ago.

although the business school did not look like a hotel then. it looked less francecy. a few things i will tell you about before i start. i'm from south africa. i have a slightly funny accent because i lived in california for four years, new york, 10 years. so when people ask me where i'm from i tell them i'm from rooklyn to confuse them. when they get quite confused, i say, yeah, east brooklyn. that confused them even more. i hope everyone can understand may. i used to have a ponytail, which is also hard to imagine. a third fact about me, i started at stanford as premed. i started the economics and premed track at the same time. ultimately, i decide to go into he business world.

just to get a sense, can i take a quick poll -- who are undergrads in the audience? and business school students? and members of the community? faculty? great. we have an excellent and diverse udience. you will have a good dialogue, i imagine people are split on these issues. a couple things i will say -- the professor mentioned the op-ed i wrote about goldman sachs. everything i said i very much believe is true to the industry. i do not think -- goldman is a smart firm and excellent firm at what it does. i do not think it practices are very different to the industry more broadly. when i wrote the book and the

op-ed, i was using my career there as a view of what i think has become conflicted in the industry. the second thing i would say, i think a lot of people would would want to classify my views or this talk as in the occupy wall street camp or a different type of camp. i would say, i am very much a capitalist. i just have the view that free markets imply that the playing field is fair and there aren't a lot of conflicts of nterest. a big thesis of my book and what i was trying to get across in the op-ed is the fact that capitalism, at least in the financial industry, i no longer think is on an even playing field. i think advantages are stacked in favor of banks and against their clients.

i will get to this more later on. let me tell you the three things i will discuss today. the first is, has anything really changed in the industry? certainly when i wrote the op-ed, a lot of people said, things have always been this way. or, wall street has always operated in a certain sense. i will tell you how, at least since i was sitting where you were 15 years ago, in my opinion, things have changed. the second thing i will tell you is, with all these changes, how do banks exploit conflicts of interest to make money in a way that i view as unfair at best and potentially very systemically dangerous to ociety at worst? then, what needs to change in order to fix this and why hasn't enough changed?

on that point, i would ask, how many people in this room have heard of the dodd-frank act? how many people think the dodd-frank act has been implemented? 2.5 years since dodd-frank was passed, less than one third of it has been implemented and more than three quarters of the eadlines have been missed. millions of dollars were spent lobbying against it. perception that conditions have changed -- i want to show you guys why they have not changed. why obama or romney or any number of politicians would want people to think. starting with the point of what has changed, i think there have always been practices on wall street that are not great and are dubious.

the simplest way to mark what has changed is look how banks make their money. and i joined the firm in 2000, when i joined wall street, at least half the money was being made in the original things that made finance get called finance. wall street finance, things that help companies raise money. they acted as an advisor in many apacities. when i joined, about 60% of goldman sachs also revenue within the banking side of the business. there will always be conflicts, but there aren't less complex than in the trading side of the business. fast forward to 2007, close to 80% of the money is being made in the trading business, which is a very marked change. i do not think people can debate

that as being non-factual. with that kind of revenue change does is leads to behavioral and ultural changes. what occur that allowed this revenue shift to change? three main things occurred around the time when i was joining wall street. the first thing, in 1999 there was a thing called the glass-steagall act separated commercial banks from investment banks. it was repealed. in 2000, there was a thing called the commodity futures modernization act which essentially took complex securities called derivatives and deregulated them. it allowed the trading of derivatives to move off exchanges and basically into the dark. the third thing was, a thing called the net capital rule was overturned. hat that did was allowed

banks to increase their leverage - if you have $1 you can effectively lev it up by taking bets 10, 20, 30 times the amount by borrowing extra money. from the early 2000's to the mid 2000's, banks took leverage from five to one up to 35 to one. with these three things, which were all regulatory in nature and all lobbied for by the banking industry, it became very clear that as a professor said, the old model of long-term greed, which was the motto goldman sachs had for many years, which essentially said if we do right by clients over the long term and maybe turn away business in the short term which can affect our reputation, they will keep coming back to us. we will have a collaborative

relationship with the client as a partner and they keep paying us and keep doing business with us because they trust us. this shifted to a model i would call short-term greedy, which ultimately makes more profits for individuals and for the firm in a short-term but in a long-run standpoint does not serve your business well and does not serve the society well. because potentially you are doing business that is toxic to your clients and ultimately endangers the system, as we saw in 2008 where merrill lynch, aig, they had taken such huge risks that it ultimately brought the whole system down and the government had to come in and bail the system out. so we talk about all these regulations occurring -- what basically happens is it becomes clear it is more advantageous for the bank to start betting with their own money. when you can take levered bets

of 30-1 you may start seeing a client more as an information provider to help you bet more smartly as opposed to seeing your client as a partner you help to make returns on their money. in the early to mid part of my career i saw this cultural shift occur. the firm started seeing what the biggest mutual funds and pension funds in the world were doing and started implementing their wn bets using this information in a way that was not insider trading technically but allowed banks to use this big picture sitting in the middle position o bet. goldman sachs trading revenues in 2002 were $5 billion. i 2007 it was $38 billion. it is -- businesses do not multiply by five or six times in five or six years unless there is some meaningful shift in the mindset.

ultimately that leads to a what i would call a behavioral shift. it does not happen overnight. if people are being incentivized to use my information to better the firm's own money and nobody is telling them there is anything wrong with that, it filters up and down an organization. this shift occurred everywhere on wall street during that period. a few examples to show this mindset shift, in the last year or so, countdown what i call the scandals that show this kind of swing from the fences behavior. you had mf global, a futures brokerage in chicago, where the head of the firm started making proprietary bets on the sovereign crisis in europe and alternately the firm went bankrupt.

there was a scandalous situation where they were potentially using customer money to fund these bad bets. secondly, in the last few months we all heard about the libor rating scandal. libor is an interest rate that affects hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets throughout the world. this is, i would say, a example of this, where traders were collaborating with each other to set an interest rate because they knew they would make more money for the firm. look at the facebook ipo -- we can argue endlessly what is facebook's fault or morgan stanley's fault, the investors fault, but certainly a manifestation of this let's swing for the fences and try to get as much out of this deal as possible. let me go on to point two, to explain how banks make this money using an analogy i used in my books.

if you compare wall street today, 75% of revenues come from trading, to a real casino. not everybody likes gambling, but whether we like gambling or do not, when you walk into a casino you can have a lot of faith that the rules are not going to change during the game and that there are cameras all over the floor and that there is a regulatory body that for the most part is keeping an eye on things. the other thing i would say is the casino, the house is not allowed to take bets based on what everybody in the casino is doing. it is what i call an objective counterparty. let's run through this analogy a little bit. if you think about an investment bank, they are not dealing everyone cards. let's say at the table is a pension fund, a hedge fund, a mutual fund, hundreds of billions of dollars sitting at the table.

that bank, or the dealer, can see what all those people are doing and can then go out and use that information to place their own bets. you would expect someone not to lose very often if you could see everyone's cards. this is very much borne out in an example we see every quarter where banks have to release their results on the trading books for the whole quarter. there are many quarters where a bank will literally make a profit 100% of the time. hat is like batting 1.000. i am sure most people in this room invest in the market. if you make money 50.1% of the time you are probably outperforming any people in the arket. it is very hard to understand how trading books can make money 100% of the time unless you have some kind of asymmetric information advantage.

that is where i would come back to the analogy of you are seeing what everybody else is doing, so you can bet a lot smarter with your own money. the second part of the analogy, i mentioned the cameras. what happened with the deregulation of derivatives is gambling can be taken to a back room where there are no cameras and no one is tracking who is losing a lot of money and making a lot of money. this is the example of lehman brothers and bear stearns and merrill lynch, where no one knew how much risk they had on their books. it turns out they had all sorts of risk and nobody in the market knew or understood them. this is the big danger of business being done in an opaque fashion, in the dark, in a very complex nature. i would argue that ultimately you need to bring began pulling out of the dark room and bring it back into the light. in exchange, where everyone can ee what is going on.

to continue a little with the analogy. this is what i think is the most dangerous part of the way business is done on wall street today. the dealer. when you are playing blackjack, i think everyone knows the rules. if you get more than 21 you are bust. there are certain statistical probabilities you should and should not bet on. when you go to a casino, does anyone in the audience expect the dealer to give them bad information? for example, where the dealer is actually telling you when you are on 19 that you should take another card? o one would expect, at least when i have been to casinos, -- the dealer is kind of on your side and somewhat friendly and will tell you. you often see people who never gambled before who will take another card of 19 and ruin everyone else's hand. the dealer would like to tell ou this is a bad idea.

i think you have what i would call an implicit sense of trust, we do not expect the dealer to misguide you. what sometimes happens on wall street is a client or investor will get told to do something that if they understood the ules of the road very well would know is not in their interest to do. yet a wall street firm will tell them you should do this because they're firm might make 15 million or $20 million off of this. they are not technically doing anything illegal. that person walked into the casino. they are responsible for their own actions. i think this is where a big misunderstanding comes from. many of you remember, in 2010 there was a big sec lawsuit against goldman sachs. there was a big hearing in front of carl levin where a lot of

swear words -- one particular word was used over 20 times because of how bankers spoke about these deals. the big argument for why it was ok to sell someone something without full disclosure or without telling them your intention was this idea that everyone is a big boy. if they come to play they deserve what is coming to them. even if there is a sense of deception or a sense of misleading them. now, i think a lot about the words fiduciary duty. this is a word thrown around a lot. but the essential meaning of it is that when someone is coming to you for advice, if you are bound by a fiduciary obligation you owe that clients, that person, the duty of telling them what is in their interest in what is not in their nterest.

over the time i was at wall street, it has turned into the sense that a fiduciary duty is not owed to anyone. the big problem with that is i would argue many clients with hundreds of billions of dollars of assets to not understand that. i will give you two examples that ultimately led to me writing the op ed. i would like all of you to think about this as an ethical dilemma, especially since we live in a time today where the idea of ethics versus legality are very different things. it if something is technically legal and will not get you sent to jail, a lot of people will do hat thing. an example, we recently had a terrible storm, hurricane sandy. everybody gave donations to the red cross society or any number of charities. i think what the general public does not know is that red cross, every university, stanford,

harvard, teachers pension funds, governments, are the biggest fish in the market. they have hundreds of billions of dollars of assets and are what i would ask is, as a hypothetical example, if the red cross society came to you and asked to trade a very competition derivative product that was going to pay the firm $20 million yet you knew it was not in their interest, but it would not necessarily get you sent to jail because the government classified it as sophisticated. would you do that business? more and more i saw the attitude and behavior moved to a point where yes, we will do that business because they are a big boy. i would argue it has reached a point where because of the asymmetric information i told you about not everybody is on an even playing field. i think more needs to be done to

prevent that kind of behavior. the second example i would give you is a very powerful one. for helping me make my decision. the european sovereign crisis, which is still boiling but we may remember last summer or the summer of 2011 when it looks like portugal, spain, italy were teetering on bankruptcy. i would go to trading meetings every morning and our traders would have a very negative view on the european banks, yet we were being asked to go to some of the biggest investors in the world and try to convince them why the european banks were such an attractive investment, purely because we did not like the investment and wanted to sell the banks but we needed somebody else on the side of the trade to buy the banks. if we were just talking about some arcane investment that did not affect anyone this might not be so relevant. but i would go to my desk and i

would see the biggest banks in france and all over europe moving up and down five percent- 10% a day. largely driven by this idea that every two days to drum up business clients at banks across wall street would be convinced that today's the day to sell, tomorrow you should buy, now is the time to panic. the truth is, traders across wall street did not really believe conditions were changing on the ground every day. to me this started having real world impact. millions of citizens across europe are affected by the fact that their governments cannot get their act together and banks are trying to drum up business in order to make their profits at the end of the quarter. this ultimately became something that i thought crossed the line of the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. ethical versus legal. it got to a point where i felt this was not the type of

business i wanted to do anymore. the final point i will talk about before i take some questions and answers will be what needs to change in order to fix the system in my opinion. one thing i would say, which i do not expect a lot of people know, is that the five biggest banks in america are now bigger than they were before the financial crisis. whatever people claim or do not claim, banks still have an input said, and i would argue almost exclusive, guarantee that government will support them. just to explain a little bit, there was an example last summer where a jpmorgan trader who was nicknamed the giant whale or the london whale basically took a massive debt, lost $6 billion for the firm, got a wrist slap,

lost his job. the person who ran the group over the course of her career made more than $50 million, and left the job. if that loss had been $200 billion instead of $6 billion the thing that happened to the person who took the trade would be exactly the same. they would get a wrist slap, leave the bank, and a society would have to bailout the bank because of this existing implicit and explicit guarantee. anybody who talks about free- market capitalism, we saw in 2008 when faced with the idea of are you really going to let the banks fail, the truth is the government was not willing to take the risk and see what happened. everyone on wall street knows that. there is now incentive to swing for the fences and do whatever you can to maximize profits because of the trade goes bad

you will just lose your job. everyone has to bail the banks out. i think what this amounts to today is what i call a privatization of profit and a socialization of downside risk. that is still in force today. anybody who claims it is not in a force is not, in my mind, telling the truth. why is not enough done to fix this? i would -- at the end of the book i point the finger back at politicians. the truth is that i think the thing we should all be most outraged about is, look at the senate banking committee, who are the firms that are giving them the greatest campaign contributions? goldman sachs, jp morgan, morgan stanley -- look at the regulators. the hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying in order to kill regulation. this is very counterintuitive to me.

a way to kill legislation in today's day and age is not to get rid of it or to get it struck from the act. it is to fatten it up. this was not obvious to me at first. a thing called the volcker rule, designed to completely eliminate proprietary trading, banks betting with their own money. it started out as a two-page document written by two senators as an amendment to dodd frank. two years later there was something like 700 pages. banks realize that if they can get the law firms to exert hundreds of loopholes and amendments you ultimately reach a point where the law is so complicated that nobody can actually -- you have achieved a victory were nothing has changed at the end of the day. we need to say the politicians, number one, why do you not have the political will to actually fix a problem that affects everyone?

banks can still be profitable, can still do things that serve economic prosperity, raising money, helping companies merge, but when 80% of bank profits are coming from trading i do not think of banks or are being honest with the public with how their money is being raised. look at commercials and tv for citigroup goldman sachs or jpmorgan. you would think they are in the business of helping new orleans rebuild or giving money to charities. certainly there is a significant amount of philanthropy on wall street. but i would say to you that the amounts of money made by investing in urban communities is less than 10%. i think there needs to be a greater sense of honesty, where people are upfront and say 80% of the money is being made in a business that the public does not understand, frankly politicians do not fully

understand, and i would say to you regulators are not resourced enough or nimble enough to understand things because they are so complex. so what i am advocating for is a return to the old long-term model where you do business, you make money, the clients make returns, banks can still be profitable. and people who do things that risk the systemic safety of the economy are held accountable. the way to do that, and i'm not a huge fan of regulation, but i think the three big things you need to do. one is derivatives. you need to bring them back the light. you need to bring them onto exchanges. proprietary trading, through the volcker rule, you need to out live. the law does not have to be 700 pages. it can be one page. a lot of times banks will hide behind market making or hedging, which is a more competent discussion. what i would tell you is it is a way to hide behind something

that will let you continue to do proprietary trading. the third one, which i'm interested to hear what people in the audience think, is about our bank still too big to fail and are they too big and too complex to manage? i would say they definitely are. i would say there is critical mass building where you do not want to be destructive of the banks but when they are still so systemically dangerous is there merit to making them smaller? spin off the trading business from the retail side? i would argue that yes, there is merit to that. with those three things, i will leave it there. thanks for listening. i will open it up for questions. [applause] >> first come first serve? go ahead.

>> thank you for speaking. it seems like a lot about what you are talking about was a policy analysis of what the situation is on wall street today. but there are a lot of us in the audience who are interested in taking those issues the way you described it from a personal perspective, if we were in your shoes, what is our duty and what is the best way to effect change? one thing that i noticed was since you wrote the op-ed and attracted a massive amount of media attention, a lot of that momentum seems to have died down over time. there does not seem to be the same degree of scrutiny over goldman or wall street generally. it made me wonder, maybe part of it is because publicly publicizing your reason for leaving goldman sachs, even potentially sympathetic employees at goldman think there is some pressure to defend the integrity of the firm because they are attacked from the outside. perhaps you faced more resistance than you would've had

you taken this internally. i'm wondering, given the information you know today, if you had to do it all over again would you think it would have made more sense to have the same content of the op-ed but not take it to the "new york times" but e-mail it to every employee in the goldman sachs worldwide directory? >> that is a great question. there is a way to send something to everyone in the global directory, which everyone fantasized about at some point. if you have mistakenly sent an e-mail to everyone. what i would say to you is it took me -- in the book, i say i wrote the op-ed over four months. i went through a process of having dozens of conversations, first with the people sitting around me. behind closed doors, a lot of people on wall street feel a sense of angst about the sense that the game could end any day. i think everyone, 95% of wall street, are fundamentally decent

people. but i think they're being asked to do things that, as i have been talking about, step over the line of what i think is ethical at times. what i would say to you -- i do not think goldman sachs is the problem. i think this is a systemic problem. i know the professor was saying there is a real temptation to think that if we send two or three bad eggs to jail the problem will be fixed. the point i tried to get across in my book is that this is not a problem about a few bad people making bad ethical decisions. this is about a whole system that does not just encourage people to make these decisions, but incentivizes them. their bonus will be directly determined by how much they bring in. i've had conversations to check with people who felt similar.

i also had conversations with goldman partners behind closed doors, half of whom agreed with me about these ethical lapses and long for a time about returning to this long-term agreement tally. it gets to a point where it is the golden goose -- as long as it is paying people money, there's not a lot of incentive to pull the curtain back and actually change the system. what i would say to you is that there are a lot of people in difficult situations. not just relative to the world, but people who have kids going to private school, all sorts of bills. living an expensive life. by sending a letter to people internally i could very quickly see through my conversations with people, including a couple in the management committee. by the way, i think this applies to any firm. there is not a lot of incentive to change something. if you are doing something and

are not going to jail are going to trouble for it, in my opinion by talking to people about it internally you will not have an impact. i think this problem is as big as politicians and regulators not understanding the broader problem. alternately i decided i was going to leave. i did not think there would be merit in trying to say something publicly -- i did think there would be merit in trying to say something publicly, not to destroy profitability on wall street but may be restored to a more stable fashion. giving you an example for the business school students. look at, is a short-term greediness actually good for goldman sachs's business or jpmorgan's business? i would say i do not think it is good for the business. look at how the stock market values banking stocks. banking stocks are valued at below value. even the markets does not like this model where there is no predict ability, no sustainability, no long-term orientation.

look at jpmorgan's earnings statement. there is zero disclosure of how the money is made and where it is made from. investors cannot value companies correctly. i just thought there would be something to be said for saying something publicly. i think the people from within the industry do not say something -- nothing will change. we will go through a cycle where every seven or eight years we have bubbles that expand and ultimately burst. let's hope it does not happen again. >> that is pretty discouraging. you bring out a really good point that the process of regulation seems to be kind of hopeless. big money will defeated over time by boring from within. who watches the watchmen? is that an ethical thing we have to have, to change the structure?

how do you see the move from these great investment houses moving from a partnership to a corporation, and do you see a correlation of that, the emphasis on a fiduciary relationship versus a counterparty relationship. do you see that? >> i see that as being a huge contributor to the problem. goldman sachs was the last large private firm on wall street. when you are a private partnership your partners? incentives are much more aligned with clients. if you do a deal with the government of libya and it ruins your reputation and people pull money from your firm, you will feel immediate pain because your capital is tied up. when these firms became public it became much harder to take ownership of the problem. i do think that it is an issue. it is hard to go back in time and privatized firms, but when they were private incentives

were aligned. i think client interest was better served and banks were less dangerous because they were less big. the reason banks became public is because of this move in the late 1990s to create what i call these banking supermarkets like citigroup. in order to compete every investment bank had to get bigger by getting public funding. if we could go back in time and reverse glass-steagall being repealed, reverse the derivatives being deregulated, reverse the leverage issues, in my opinion i do not think we would have had this scandal as bad. the financial crisis could have still occurred, but i do not think it would have occurred on the same scale. alternately i think the way you fix it now is point the finger at politicians and regulators and say, we elected you to understand what is going on. if the system is too complex to understand you need to make the

system less complex. if you are being corrupted or unable to be objective because people are giving you money and lobbying and funding your campaigns, the a left rate needs to vote those people out of office and say, this senator is no longer objective. this regulator running the sec no longer understands what is going on. i have said the public is not more tuned into this issue. my biggest goal in the book was really to write this book not for a wall street audience or anyone who knows anything about finance, but to write it for people who know nothing about finance. to pull the curtain back to show. there are a lot of good things going on wall street, but a lot of conflicts of interest. only if the public holds politicians feet to the fire will things change. my hope -- an earlier question was how can business school students and college students change things. one thing, speak to politicians,

hold them accountable. fill yourself in on issues. when you do work in finance, act within your own ethical compass. one by one people can change things. but i do think politicians ultimately probably harbor the largest amount of blame in this. >> this was a great segue to my question. what are your plans for the future as far as her career? i think you would be great in congress are working for the sec or the department of justice with your background in values. i'm sure there are people in this room who would support you. >> thank you. i told some people i am becoming a dj, which is not a very popular thing, as a joke. in the short term my plan is to try to bring awareness to i would say the motion or term crisis, the fact that dodd frank is dying what i call a very slow death by a thousand cuts. i am sure everyone tuned into the presidential election. not one candidate talks about

financial reform. does not matter if you are democratic or republican. there is literally one person running for senate to even mention it, who is a elizabeth warren. we can agree or disagree about whether her views are accurate or not, but what i do commend her for is that she is talking about it. if it affects people's lives, politicians should talk about it. i want to give talks like this to give a little bit of awareness to what i think is a serious problem. longer term, i would like to be helpful to congress and to the sec. i have been in touch with people in congress, and i hope to be helpful to them. in terms of my longer term plans, have not figured it out yet. a lot of people said, you have burned your bridges on wall street, you will never work there again. but i think the point i make to

people is that that is not what i hear from the public in terms of this idea of returning to fiduciary standards. the big players in the market are not hedge funds. hedge funds -- those investors account for five percent. the big players are teachers pension pants and sovereign wealth funds and mutual funds to hold 401(k)'s and donations and retirement savings. i would like to be part of the solution in terms of bringing a greater fiduciary standard back to markets. >> earlier in your talk you mentioned merrill lynch and lehman brothers and bear stearns as being three firms that were overleveraged and operating in the dark. and they kind of disappeared. could you give us your thoughts on why lehman was allowed to burn up and the other two were rescued?

>> it is a very controversial topic, which i think conspiracy theorists will talk about for a long time. but i was sitting on the trading floor when that happened. when lehman brothers was allowed to fail, any record checkers or fact checkers should go back and look at the editorials the following day. liberal periodicals and conservative periodicals praised hank paulson for drawing a line in the sand and saying, you know what, if you take irresponsible risk in your leaders are not willing to fix the problem or show the right amount of transparency, you are going to be allowed to die. ultimately when the government reversed course on aig and molto other things i think it showed a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the market area everyone panicked, and it led to more

problems. looking back on that, i think there was a mismanagement in that what markets like, anyone who invests in stocks will no markets like consistency. they like to be able to see what will happen in the future. the fact that every day was a guessing game of who will be allowed to live and die was a very dangerous thing. i think perhaps everyone should have been saved or everyone should have been allowed to die. i think everyone would have been scared to see what happened. that is an extreme view. but ultimately i think history will look back on it and the crisis probably would have been worse if -- i say it is hard to say. you need a crystal ball in order to tell. >> first of all, thank you for speaking out on wall street. a lot of paychecks are dependent on not speaking out. i wanted to thank you for that. there is precedent for prosecuting people for securities fraud, like in the 1980s during the savings and

loan scandal. i wanted your thoughts about how or why there have been zero criminal prosecutions of any wall street executives. >> an excellent question. i think the question everyone in america asks. the reason is quite simple. the laws are not, i would say, on the level that allows criminal prosecutions to take place very easily. this is what wall street wants. right now you need to prove criminal intent to defraud people. look at any number of examples, the mf global example, a particularly egregious one where jon, the former head of goldman, a former governor of new jersey, essentially $1 billion of money disappeared. the reason they will tell the public that nobody went to jail or was prosecuted is because in

order to prove intent that they were trying to defraud people, it is a very hard thing to do. i would argue -- as i said, i would not classify myself as a pro-regulation person, but any thinking person realizes that if everyone is driving race cars and there are zero speed limits and everyone is just mandated to self regulate and not crashing the people, alternately you will get bad actors to crash into other people. i think the laws need to be more strict. the hope was that the momentum coming out of the crisis would be used to change those laws, but unfortunately things are fading into memory. frankly, that is what banks want. they want us to receive into memory. personally i thought the jpmorgan example was something that should have been a much bigger deal.

it was very symptomatic of this reckless, we gamble and if we win we keep the profits and if we lose we do not have to worry about it. it was an opportunity for congress to change things. someone speaking at the business will next week has done great work prosecuting insider trading. go for the low hanging fruit. it is easy to prove a billionaire used misinformation in order to make some money for himself or herself. the truth is that insider trading does not actually affect that many people. the real issue in my mind that the justice department and lawmakers should be going after is the systemic issue of, i mentioned earlier the proprietary trading. i would tell you it is absolutely going on. it is just going on under what i call a new term, hedging or market making. we are doing this. the truth is in my mind much less is being done in the service of clients.

much more is being done by using the fact of serving clients to make yourself money and place your own bets. i think congress needs to become a lot smarter fixing the rules. if they can fix that rule i think it will be more valuable than sending people to jail. the great danger of that is then everybody says we have fixed the problem. the real problem is much greater and much more systemic in my mind. >> you mentioned mutual funds are among the major players in the market. do these systemic factors that you mentioned have a significant impact on what i will call mainstream mutual funds that invest in equities or fixed income as opposed to the fringe players? should we as individual investors have concerns? >> absolutely. i will give you a couple examples. may 2010, there was a thing called the flash crash where the market literally dropped 12% in one second.

nobody could explain what happened. people who researched the issue speak about a thing called high frequency trading, which wall street firms have computers that they get to the stock a millisecond before anybody else. this creates a lot of volatility. i would argue that mutual funds, no matter how vanilla, are still investing in stocks. if the market cannot be assumed to be fair and without uneven advantages, i do think people should be concerned. i do think mutual funds should also be held accountable not to use products like derivatives when they do not fully understand them. a lot of the time they don't. >> thank you very much. >> i have a question that is related to some of the answers you have provided. i think all of your responses have talked about regulations that are instituted and also

talked about incentives and perhaps disincentives for some of the behavior that he this. i would like to understand, given the complexity of enforcing regulations and what you have advised the audiences and future generation of financiers in wall street -- what would you recommend on the business side aside from the legal consequences of violating regulations, something that relates to the financial rewards? in that context, if you could also tell us what differentiates what goes on here in the us versus the european market? >> good question. i think a lot has been raised about compensation on wall street. i think one of the ways wall street firms will defend paying people 10 million or 20 million

or $30 million is that if we do not do it they will go somewhere else and do it. i think this is a circular thing that keeps going around. if firms decided to bring incentives back in line things would change. the way you do this is you have to tie compensation and incentives to the performance of your clients, and have to tie it to a long-run orientation where you take away the incentive the london whale had to swing for the fences because they wanted a big bonus in year one. you have to make compensation based on a five-year or 10-year record where clawbacks are very strict and are enacted. yesterday i am sure many people saw jamie dimon, ceo of j.p. morgan, his compensation was cut because of the london whale yesterday. people might say that is a great victory. i would say that to me it is more of a band-aid, trying to show the public. there needs to be a more

systemic change in incentives. the truth is that human nature and agreed it is something we as a people in my mind cannot regulate. if one had to fall some of the protests that took place around wall street, what i think is effective is to protest something very simple and factual, like bring derivatives onto exchanges. outlaw proprietary trading. do not give people the ability to swing for the fences. you take away the product they are using to do that. i think you try to tell people you need to make less money or we are going to your pay at x amount does not -- i do not think that jibes with american capitalism as i see it. people should be able to get rich and make lots of money. i just think they should be required to do it in a transparent way that does not endanger other people.

i think the easiest solution in my mind is to hold regulators accountable, hold politicians accountable, and take away the things that allow people to swing for the fences by regulating the markets. in terms of the question about europe versus the us, europe i would say is more like the wild west than the us. the last chapter nine book, when i moved to london i actually called the chapter the wild west because there is very much a greater sense of anything goes. i would say the us is a leader in a lot of these products, and the europeans follow. if the us can get these laws right, one reason congress doesn't want the passes he does it they do it here banks remove the euro. i guarantee that if the us changes something makes the system more responsible they will be a sense of arbitrage

around the world where everybody will try to get somewhere else, but ultimately the us is the strongest market in the world and i think others will follow if we do things here. >> in terms of your second point of the asymmetric nature of information and the casino analogy, when we talk about deposit creation like what is going on right now, the last month of last year there was $220 billion of deposit creation in the us system, it is working its way into fractional reserves and then the banks are obviously hedging as you pointed out, possibly not in a best interest. in terms of the deposit creation, the largest in history, who -- where is that money coming from, and in the casino analogy who is that person? >> i think deposit creation comes from the fact that you

look at retail investors and how much they have been investing in the stock market. since the flash crash in 2010 it has dropped significantly. i think there is a sense that people just want to put their money in a bank account and keep it safe to an extent. i think it is the fearfulness that come to invest in the market. do i believe that a big bank like citigroup or jpmorgan is using those funds recklessly? i do not think so. but are they proprietary trading? yes. that was the example of the london whale. i would hope that the system and the stock market become more transparent. investors do not feel the need to put their money into savings accounts but in vast. because that has helped the market grow. >> you mentioned a number of banks that have behaved rather

badly. what are the banks that have behaved well? that have been more profitable than the banks that paved badly? if not, you have a reversal. >> look at the canadian banks. just as an example. they did not have a unending leverage. they did not get the same complex products. they weathered the financial crisis just fine. i would say in the us, you look at banks like wells fargo that did not have a similar ratcheting up of risk and the fiduciary responsibility, look at the more boutique asset management places whose interests were not all over the place and did not have all sorts of conflicts. i think they survived a little better. in retrospect i think banks like

goldman sachs and morgan stanley and frankly jpmorgan were lucky to have survived the crisis. i think there was an effect occurring -- the government would step in and save. i think the people who weathered the crisis just fine were the ones who retained this fiduciary duty, where they were not betting against their clients, were not using client information to make themselves money. at the time they were less profitable but five years later i would argue they are a lot stronger and on less shaky ground. >> in the case of, was it because of any government regulation? >> it was. governments were not allowed to take 31 leverage. there were not allowed to proprietary trade in the same sense. well we as americans want maximum profit and maximum capitalization, the speed limit topic is relevant. if you have smart curbs that do

not allow you to make 50 times the amount of money but also do not allow you to lose times the amount of money, i think it is just smarter. >> i wanted to say, i applaud your courage. that was a great day to post on facebook your announcement and get feedback from friends and family. you talked about the ethical and legal dimensions of your decision-making process. this is your token seminarian question. was there a moral or religious dimension to that? >> you know, a theme that runs through the book -- i am jewish, and i do think that my upbringing has some effect on things. when i talk about the idea of a charity or philanthropy or university being charged hidden fees, i do think there is a ethical element that ways on

that that stems from one's religious upbringing. i do think it had some impact. i think it goes to this final line between ethics and legal, and there are too many people willing to make decisions that are technically legal but not necessarily immoral. i think religion in my mind plays a part in that. that is a good question. one last question, and let's wrap it up. >> in order to effect change you have to almost use the kiss principle -- keep it simple, stupid. could you boil it down to two items on a macro basis -- repeal the repeal of glass-steagall and derivatives, bring it back to where it was in the clinton era because it seems to have worked for 70 years. secondly, on a micro basis would've restrictions such as

what happens with morgan stanley where the treasurers get compensated in deferred compensation over five years, would that not create the disincentives to bet the house for next year's bonus? >> to keep it, i agree. the two major history -- regulatory things i am advocating for are the repeal of the two things that happened in the early 2000's that led to a lot of problems. derivatives being re-regulated. the cftc has been sitting on it for two and a half years and has not made a lot of progress. the second is the volcker rule, which in a sense is a little bit like many of the things glass- steagall stood for. there are certainly people who stand for the full repeal of glass-steagall. there are huge political fears about doing that, but i do think some form of breaking up extremely large banks and

disallowing reckless trading activity is noteworthy. i do think the thing about compensation and deferring is essential. but does it fix the problem completely? i do not think so. the truth is that if you swing for the fence in year one and your bonus, things do not work out, you can still leave and go to a hedge fund or go do something else. i do think that the law actually has to become stricter. i think greed and swinging for the fences will always be around. it is impossible to stop. so i think you actually need to change the root cause, which is if someone gambles with client money or bets against their client, that person needs to potentially go to jail or have some disincentive that is so great that if you're reckless person, there are only two or three things they think about

before they endanger the whole house. laws have to change in addition to compensation. but not irresponsible laws, just ones that create curbs that do not allow reckless activity. thank you very much, everyone. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] coming up, the nra report on gun violence in schools. followed by elijah cummings speaking about proposed gun regulation. then goldman sachs employee greg smith on the wall street culture. that is followed by henry paulson on china's economic

policies. wednesday, the colombo early journalism review josé panel risk -- discussion on how journalists cover race and social mobility. see it live at 8:00 eastern on c-span two. coming up, i hearing examining -- and with pre-existing health conditions. the house and congress subcommittee on health will look at it now encrypt program that protectgned to americans. see it live it 1:00 eastern on c-span 2. , howople like to ask me did you come across this story? people always ask writers that.

what happens is you find a new story while you are supposed to be working on something else. this can be frustrating at times. that is exactly what happened to me. i was doing internet research one day, and look at this photo. if this is photo i came across. it was on a dip permanent energy website. -- it was my department of energy website. in history, there seemed that biffle vanishing that -- there seem to be biffle vanishing point. i was just so sucked into it. .he woman just looked so lovely they have their and nice posture and their hairdos. i read the caption and it said, these young women, many of them have school graduates, were enriching uranium for the world

's first atomic bomb. they did not know that at the time. >> the lives and work of women in atomic city, oak ridge, tennessee. one of the manhattan project secret cities. saturday, 11:00. >> in their documentary, "poverty, america's untold crisis," frank boudon and jason ji look at the economic impact on the u.s.. >> frequently called the most cosmopolitan city of the midwest, detroit today stands at the threshold of a bright new future, one rich with the promise of fulfillment. >> that was 1965. since then, things have drastically changed. detroit's once positive outlook has been crushed by economic collapse. >> nowadays, the city is facing

numerous complications, touch as inadequate education, high crime rate, and high implement. it affects detroit and america as a whole. it is also the issue that is most often ignored -- poverty. >> we had an infrastructure that look like a diamond. now it looks more like a pyramid. >> the poor is getting poor. sooner or later, the request will not exist. >> properties the new american norm. >> that is 50 million people living in substandard conditions. the nation is facing its highest level of poverty since 1983. how can the obama administration save america from this untold crisis? >> poverty. >> poverty. >> poverty. >> we hear this word all the time. but what does it really mean?> there are many ways to approach property. we need to look at its

implications for people and society. in the ms. general sense, it is when an individual is unable to procure life necessities. >> it is not being able to provide for your basic needs, such as housing, food, warmth if you live in cold climates, those kinds of things come even feed yourself. >> people experiencing poverty tend to face convocations, homelessness, health problems, and the lack of hope among others. while many consider these to be serious issues, it does come in varying degrees. as america standard of living is rising, many luxuries are becoming necessities. >> cell phones. let's take cell phones did they used to be thought of as such a luxury. now they are a necessity. if you have to call on a job, you need that cell phone. if you have to call to make a doctors appointment, you need

that cell phone. >> it has major implications for society as well. those who are poor are often unable to contribute and must rely on others to support them. >> the entire society suffers. people that are poor and not producing effect the entire societal economics eight. >> -- economic state. >> rather than legitimate sources of income, they are looking for other forms of income. >> in fact, the property crime rate rose 11% from 2010 to 2011 and the crime rate is the highest it has been in decades. >> it was an effect on the morale of the country. this is the generation that will not do as good. >> if we want our nation to progress, the first at this

controlling poverty. statistically, the official poverty measure comes from the u.s. census euro. this measure, based on -- census bureau. this measure, based on the process of the 1960s, is far from perfect. >> it has some real problems. >> it fails to account for factors, such as taxes, in-kind benefits, and other living expenses. fortunately, there are alternative measures. it takes into account all of the measures and takes a realistic look at the situation. the sad truth is that poverty is higher than expected. 61% in 2011. >> the poverty that happens when major life things happen.

it's a you get a divorce or you have a major medical issue that are you could not work for a while, things that send people in time into poverty. but then you have chronic poverty. when you graduate for high school, you won't get a job that will pay decently. or you graduate, but you don't have an skills. >> the face of party is multifaceted. there is more than one answer to our nation's questions. >> the problems of party can be easy to fix. while the private sector deftly contributes to the social safety net, government intervention is what really makes a defense in the short run. ask -- makes a difference in the short run. >> many people lost their jobs. >> food stamps and medicaid can help people overcome the ups and the road. they can help them -- the bumps in the road could a can help

them get back on track. >> whether the government hands out without expecting the receiver to do anything, that is not good for the government nor for the individual. the reason is for the dependency on the poverty individual. >> from a monetary standpoint, welfare has been severely inefficient. over $15 trillion have been spent as the great society and that has resulted in a jumbled change in the property rate. >> the benefits to the poor have increased by 375%. we are not hitting any bang for our welfare book, are we -- for our world fai -- for our welfare buck, are we? >> long-term poverty is more deeply rooted in those suffering from chronic poverty are in a vicious cycle.

>> all of us are passing a silent message of lessons down to our kids. executed fixing the issues fixing education, to secure the nation's future and empower the x generation. >> the graduation rate in the poverty community is [indiscernible] >> but i am convinced, with the right education and new tools that can aid the people in poverty, they can start to get themselves out here >> america to get themselves out. >> making sure you get that kind of education and take all of us working and all of us working hand in hand. >> dear mr. president, [indiscernible] lead the nation done a certain path. since then, america has transformed from the land of opportunity and prosperity to a land plague of poverty. regardless of how we got here, the fact remains good poverty is a real factor in america.

we are deeply aware of the issues that impact our surrounding communities and living in metro detroit has exposed us to the tragedy of poverty. in your upcoming term, we ask you to focus more on this issue. thousands of people -- now is when people need you the most. while america's going through tough times, the power is in your hands, mr. president, and only time will tell what you will do with it. sincerely, two concerned american citizens. can find this video and all the other winning .ocumentaries at student cam homeroolteachers -- congressman asa hutchison says is group is working independently of the nra did not consider the impact of expanding background checks, or adding

high-capacity ammunition musings -- magazines. this is 45 minutes. >> good morning. i am asa hutchinson and i welcome you to this important presentation to increase school safety. i received a call last december from the nra. they asked if i would be interested in leading an effort on school safety. we arrived at a agreement which is my mandate. we will not have any predetermined outcomes. we would have the full support to employ the experts to develop

a review of our national efforts on school safety and make the recommendations as appropriate. the nra has fulfilled their side of the bargain. they have given us the support needed to reach their product that we are presenting today. there is no guarantee the nra will accept these recommendations. these are the recommendations of the task force. i did want to introduce the members of the task force that are here today. we're delighted that some of them have joined us. on the first row is ralph -- where are you?

over here to the side. former commissioner of u.s. customs. an expert in the field of law enforcement and security. we have a retired colonel, was air force security officer, former joint staff's anti- terrorism and homeland defense director at the pentagon. ceo of phoenix solutions. former deputy assistant secretary for critical infrastructure protection. we want to recognize some of the other members of the task force that have arrived at this report.

i am pleased to release the comprehensive report of the national school shield initiative. this report includes everything from best practices to technology to review of surveillance and includes the recommendations that i will present later in this presentation. for over three months, these experts have engaged in the assessments of multiple schools of sizes, of composition. they have done assessments and evaluations of best practices

and vulnerabilities. have conducted interviews with people knowledgeable in the field. the president of the national association of school security and a commander of school security in the philadelphia school district. thank you for joining us. one of the experts in the field. i want to go through some of the findings from the school assessments. we will present our recommendations from the task force. we will have a comment from a special guest and open it up for questions and answers. i wanted to cover some of the things that we found. we looked at the interior and an

exterior doors, architecture and design of the schools. then we look at the armed officers and the staff that may be armed. we believe they make a difference in the various layers of security. we found something very significant. there is really a two-tiered layer of security in our schools. school officers, technology and surveillance and magnetometers and policy development. then you have the smaller schools, the middle sized

schools, those that have resource challenges. they are part of a major focus will need to have. our recommendations are directed at the schools that are trying to do something with school safety but are struggling with the resources to do it. look at perimeter fencing. you'll see they are not adequate perimeter fencing for a school. ones that do might not be in proper repair. use the technology to have a single point of access for visitors to check in and to show identification.

we find that many of them have surveillance cameras. it might be at the ceiling level rather than at the eye level. look at the doors which are so critical. some of them do not have the hinge coverings to protect the and exterior doors. is there and an anti-carding device? the interior doors and windows in our best practices show some of the state of the art designed for interior doors. the windows so often go around the interior doors. are they sufficient to protect against an intruder. the bus operation. all the buses lined up to pick up the students. there is better practices for how the buses a line so you did not convert it all the students in one place as they load and

unload from the buses. we've looked at the personnel badges. sometimes the badges are not worn. sro training. there is some enhancements in training that can improve not just their training but also their coordination with law enforcement. then the armed security staff. there has been a movement to consider armed security staff. the findings referencing managing threat information which goes to the mental health side of the school environment and whether there is proper collection of threat and response, whether it is through the action of counselors in addressing any mental health challenge in the schools. there's a compilation as an appendix to this report. the best practices that we found around the nation reflecting some of the work of the to problem of education and the department of justice and the department of homeland security and appalling that

together. let me move to the recommendations of our task force. these recommendations have three audiences. first would be the national rifle association for long-term support in the area of school safety, to reflect their strong commitment in that area. second would be to state policy makers. the third audience is the federal policy makers. our first recommendation is for model training programs. we have presented a model training program for school resource officers that is an enhancement of what they currently undertake an hour required. it is 40 to 60 hours of training. that is an appendix in the presentation. we have prepared a model training program for a selected armed school personnel. this is probably the one item that catches everybody's attention. why is is part of our recommendations? there is the incident in pearl high school in 1997.

an active shooter went into the school and killed two students and wounded others. the assistant principal left the school and went to his truck and retrieved his semi- automatic firearm and return to the school and disarm the the assailants. that is an example where the response is critical. the key is reducing that response time. if he had been trained or had access on his person, he might have saved more lives.

and so -- one of the findings of the team went through one school that did not have school resource officers and they were plotting to arm school staff. when the inquiry was made about what kind of training do you have, it was clearly insufficient training. adequateon't have direction on what is a model program for armed personnel. teachers should teach. if there is a person out with good experience and is willing to go through this training of 40 to 60 hours, then that is an appropriate resource that a school should be able to utilize. we have to adopt changing the

law so it allows a firearm to be carried by school personnel when they go through this model training program. we have a model state law that can be considered for this purpose. the third recommendation is an interagency agreement between the law enforcement agency and the school. you heard the concern that police personnel in the school

or armed guards in the school somehow increases the episodes of juvenile delinquency and the reporting of disciplinary action rather than treating them routine school disciplinary incidence. they need to have clear understandings reflected in a memorandum of understanding between the school and the law enforcement agency. a critical tool, an online assessment tool that is web- based that the schools can utilize that would be on the national school shield website. this tool has been summarized in the document that we are

presenting. schools have to hire an expert or they struggle with local law enforcement to develop their policies. any tool is available for school free of charge on the website and will not be something a principal can fill out.

the school will have to be able to get access and they will be asked questions on access control. does the school and forced it to visitor sign-in and access control? what actions are taken when on authorized visitors are detected? thee are a sample of questions. then they go to the best practices to address the solutions for their security policies. a change in state education policies.

we define in our state education advocacy based on the curriculum the students take. a key part is that they have done a safety assessment and they have a plan that is in place. that is a recommendation for the states. they do something in terms of assessment. the federal policy makers -- we need to have improved coordination and more directed funding. we have three departments of the government that are all engaged in school safety -- education, justice, and homeland security. agencyed to have a lead with greater coordination.

the federal role is greater support for innovation and training grants. the school districts have absorbed the cost and they are prepared to do that. the seventh recommendation is to the nra. the national school shield become an umbrella organization to support school safety across this nation the the free access into the best practices that will be available to the schools and to create pilot programs to fine-tune the assessment tool and also to look at pilot programs in mental health and to answer questions. we recommend a long-term commitment through the national school shield. we have a specific pilot program on a threat assessment and mental health. the secret service found that 71% of attackers felt threatened or bullied. that is a pre-indicator. we recommend the nss partnering with other partners interested in mental health and that we can create programs that will be state of the art encouraging information sharing, identify

threats and offering counseling support. please read the report. it is accessible online. please give close attention to the appendices that are attached to it. now i want to introduce somebody who is the parent of james who was killed at the sandy hook elementary school, which triggered the national review of this issue of school safety. mark has expressed an interest in school safety and has asked to make a comment. so, mark? >> good morning. i wanted to take a minute and applaud the task force and the nra for spending the time and resources for putting a program like this together. it is important that everybody recognizes -- we send our children off to school. there are certain expectations and in sandy hook, those expectations were not met. this is a comprehensive program. i think politics should be set aside. i hope this does not lead to name calling. these are recommendations for solutions. solutions to make our kids safer. i read a report from 2002 which has some great input. what was done at the federal, state, and local level out of that report to make newtown or yorktown safer? i put this on you to implement solutions so people do not have to go through what i'm going through. i was on google this morning. nine school shootings since newtown. i do not know that everybody got the press with respect to the impact. i just applaud you for doing this. i think it is important. look what took place at sandy hook. mental health. that is a big component of this. we need the kids to be safe. they allow for a positive interaction with a lot

enforcement professional. -- with a law enforcement professional. people knew about what people had in mind but they didn't report it to somebody. we have to prevent this going forward. [applause] >> thank you, mark. --

>> good morning. i wanted to take a minute and

applaud the task force and the nra for spending the time and resources for putting a program like this together. it is important that everybody recognizes -- we send our children off to school. there are certain expectations and in sandy hook, those expectations were not met. this is a comprehensive program. i think politics should be set aside. i hope this does not lead to name calling. these are recommendations for solutions. solutions to make our kids safer. i read a report from 2002 which has some great input. what was done at the federal, state, and local level out of that report to make newtown or yorktown safer?

i put this on you to implement solutions so people do not have to go through what i'm going through. i was on google this morning. sincechool shootings newtown. got not know that everybody the press with respect to the impact. i just applaud you for doing this. i think it is important. look what took place at sandy hook. mental health. that is a big component of this. we need the kids to be safe. they allow for a positive

interaction with a lot enforcement professional. enforcementw professional. people knew about what people had in mind but they didn't report it to somebody. goinge to prevent this forward. [applause] >> thank you, mark. takee would be happy to questions. yes, sir. >> you talk about training volunteers.

[indiscernible] >> is there a microphone around here? >> in terms of volunteers, my impression is there would be great reluctance from school superintendents. we have shifted to school trained school staff that is designated by the school board. there is a discussion for every school district in terms of sro's and armed school staff and volunteers as well. one is a liability concern. the issue is addressed in the

best practices. the school's all-time elite make these decisions. u.s. about the cost of this effort. $1 million by the nra to fund this effort. they have supported it. looking at the support, you can see it it is a substantial investments. yes, ma'am. [indiscernible] our whole effort is about school safety. the impact i hope we have is that we talk about things that

will keep children safe for in school. these types of programs from the private sector and support from the policy makers. we want the debate focused on school safety. yes, sir? [indiscernible] >> do you see any common ground to work together? >> well, i help they continue to talk and work together. i have not focused on the

separate debate in congress about firearms and how they should be dealt with. when they are seeking common ground, i hope this will be the common ground. there are common sense steps that can be taken by policy makers. president obama supports additional funding on school safety. it is focused and you can open up the biggest chunk -- additional grants through

homeland security to the schools. they can compete with additional dollars. yes, sir? >> recent polling on gun legislation shows more than 80% of americans support universal background checks. why is that proposal not part of your shield? >> my organization is represented in this room. we might have won a few of background checks. our focus is on school safety and making our schools a safer environment. we all want to make sure that criminals, those that had been declared with mental issues, that they not have access. willis a discussion that go on. we're trying to do something about school safety. >> you would agree that non-sro personnel might be armed inside a school and they should undergo an extensive background check. >> that is part of the

recommendation. any school staff designated by the school to be a trained, armed response. they would go through background checks and testing and screening and then 40 to 60 hours of training. everybody has a different level of background and experience. that is a very comprehensive program. anyone designated as an armed response should have the adequate training to accomplish the task and be safe. [indiscernible] anyou mean in terms of accident? one thing you know for sure is the response time is critical. just like the assistant principal that i mentioned. he had to go to is truck to get a gun. if you can reduce the response

time, it will save lives. that is the objectives. firearm retention and how they know how to protect that and to make sure it is properly cared for. that is a key element of the model training program. >> you talk about response time. the shooter in newtown got off

dozens of rounds. >> in reference to newtown, was the first thing the school did after the incident? they got armed officers to protect the children. they did not have response capability. you had teachers giving up their lives. we want to have a better response, to give the schools more tools so they can respond quickly. yes, sir. >> if any part of the national school shield involves coordination with the bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms or a push with the nra to support that? i'm wondering if the atf was

involved? >> we focus on education, home and security, and justice. that has been our focus and not the atf. [indiscernible] >> the nra is entering a gun problem with more guns. >> every local school district will make a decision. we have -- i talked him at the philadelphia school district. every high school student goes through a magnetometer. i respect that decision.

other school districts want to have an armed response. they want to have a different capability. we are giving them an option. if you're interested in making the schools safer and to save children's lives, look these recommendations seriously. the presence of an armed security in a school is a layer that is just as important as a mental health component. if you have the armed presence without locking doors, it is inadequate. it is a comprehensive plan in which the armed school personnel is one element. >> does your report show how many armed personnel would be needed at a school? what do we do about recess? >> excellent question. there is no specific recommendations on how many sro's or armed personnel is in a specific school. john?

>> not specifically for the school. make sure you're looking at the entire posture of your school, your building, the number of students. >> it will be up to the school to determine the level of resources. an sro in every school building is important. right now you have sro's rotating between maybe three campuses. i would judge that insufficient. there should be at least one and every school campus to reduce response time.

>> would you review the relationships between the and the nra? >> the relationship between -- ok. am relationship -- i employed as a consultant that leads this task force in which i have asked each of these experts to independently look at issue of school safety and to make these recommendations. whether this is unanimous? everybody has signed off on this report. there is probably a lot of different political leanings and different viewpoints that are reflected.

there is a unity of opinion when it comes to these recommendations on school safety. [indiscernible] it is important that they be trained with the firearm that they carry and utilize. they have to practice with that. there is no specific recommendation on that. it is everything from and sidearm to shotgunned to ar-15. there is a variety of weapons that are utilized by the school officers based upon their local leadership and what they determine is best for their environment. u.s. question about the presence of security.

isinto a mall there security. there is security here at the national press club. there is nothing i am afraid of. i'm very wide open. there is nothing i'm nervous about. yes, ma'am. >> is it the conclusion that every school in the united states should have an armed presence? >> the specific findings is the presence of an armed security personnel in a school adds a layer of security and diminishes response time that is beneficial to the overall security. we recognize that the decision is locally made.

some school districts decide not to go that direction. we want to make sure our resources are available whenever decision is made. i come from a rural state. the smaller school districts struggle. this is a key tool to provide more options for school security and safety. >> what is the average cost to train one of these -- to maintain them every year? >> what you come up here? tony. >> the program is about 40 to 60 hours. the average cost is somewhere around $800 to $1,000 per student. there is not set cost right now that we of the attached to the

program. we have made the recommendations but we're not attached a price to that. when i say student i mean student in the training programs, not students in the schools. >> last question. >> how does it cost the school -- how do you justify paying for that?

>> you justify it because it is necessary. there is reference to a school resource officer might cost $60,000 in one jurisdiction and well over $100,000 in another. it varies. the trading costs should be a more constant. how does a school justify it?

look at the armed school personnel. the cost would be for the 40 to 60 hours. then the training cost itself. there's a lot of different ways the trading can be accomplished by the states. it would be by professional private sector trainers. it could be by the law enforcement entity in the state. we want to make sure it is accessible and we have as many traders that are properly trained as possible. that was a follow-up.

[indiscernible] that is the sandy hook report you are referring to? [indiscernible] i would be interested in what connecticut is doing for school safety. i will cite it is totally inadequate. you can address assault weapons and a dozen stop somebody bringing in a .45 caliber

firearm into the school. it doesn't stop violence in the schools. you have to do something about school safety and enhancing our safety measures in the school. it can be done. that is the purpose of this task force. thank you for your work in this. it is our hope the nra will accept these recommendations. thank you for your attendance today. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] >> michael scheerer joins us this evening. joins us thisar evening. what did we hear today and let

free love and raf -- from the nra? -- id laugh preventing those kinds of tragedies in newton. -- newtown. that canberra --

the assault weapons at one point had been seen as a marquee feature, already being done away with. there are a bunch of other little things folks can do, talking about having to do with gun trafficking laws and other things. really, what it is all boiling down to is the debate over expanded background checks, which would take the existing system and make this universal, making it so no matter where you buy it, the gun show, the friend down the street, or a licensed gun dealer, and the time you purchase a gun, you have to go through a back rent

check to make sure you are able to buy one. >> with these potential stumbling blocks, the president is back out on the road, and you will be traveling with the president to denver? goalhat is his specifically there in colorado? >> you know, it has been this way for several months. the president and the white house will do the best they can do, the highest value they can use the president for is a public shaming campaign. he made remarks last week that were very emotional on the same lines. we cannot forget the victims of newtown. we cannot forget the victims of roe, colorado. down the street from where the future master happened. -- cedar massacre happened. -- movie theater massacre happened.

it is using the bully pulpit to make that case. >> we know the assault weapons ban is off the table. can you talk about the background check, a tough sell. seven states in the district of columbia are the only ones that propose any limits on large capacity magazines. still part of the debate? >> nominally, it is. there will be some folks who will talk about that and press for that. people who are watching believe that is and non -- that is a nonstarter. and that it is not going anywhere. --. -- anywhere. mentalsure people with home -- mental health and illnesses do not get the guns

fair that kind of thing can still happen to the big debate, and you alluded to it, there is likely to be a debate next week or the did -- or the week after. debate on thea floor of the senate. that will largely revolved around background checks. >> you talk about background to administration folks in the white house. what is your sense of the best they will hope for? >> i spoke to some high level folks in the white house this morning on this topic. i think they are hopeful but somewhat resigned to the idea that they will not get everything they want. newtown,onal power of they recognized it has receded somewhat. the folks i spoke to today were talking very much on lines of, you have to judge does not by some 100% ideal of everything we

wanted, but rather, did we move the ball. were we able to get some additional tough gun restrictions? maybe it is not everything everybody wants, but it is something, and they will take it if they can get it. >> you can follow him on twitter. thank you for joining us this evening. vice happy to do it. happy to do it. >> president obama visited colorado on wednesday. he is speaking at the denver police a cavity -- academy about the gun control measures. the stars live at 5:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span. the ranking member of the oversight and government reform committee. he co-authored with a group of bipartisan lawmakers after losing his 20-year-old nephew to

gun violence in 2011. this is just under an hour. > ok, so we will begin. we are timely turn now. -- here now. welcome to the national press club. happy easter and passover season to everyone who celebrates those. and happy spring. will the world's leading organization for journalists and, as we say, the place where news happens. my name is bob wiener. today we are honored to have congressman elijah cummings of baltimore, presenting it a reality check on congressional gun legislation. rankingesentative is a member of the house oversight democratic reform committee. the congressman is the former chairman of the congressional black caucus.

now with more than 100 co- sponsors on gun tracking legislation. he takes the gun safety issue personally and points to his nephew, 20, murdered by a gun shop when he was a student. despite projections of prompt action in the newtown, conn. massacre, including 21st graders, neither chamber has moved to final passage. hisident obama insisted in state of the union address that victims of mass gun violence deserved a vote. president obama designated joe biden, including an assault weapons ban, limits on magazine capacity, and mental health monitoring and assistance. he will discuss the state of congressional action and substance of the gun tracking legislation as well as other pending bills.

the representative represents maryland's seventh district. he is a member of the joint congressional economic committee. thank you to your staff. he is congress's leader on drug policy, which is how i met him and first work for him in the white house drug office, where they incidently admire the congressman enormously.

elected in 1996 after serving in the house of delegates for years, he was the first african-american in the history maryland and to be named to second highest office. he states he has dedicated his life to uplifting and empowering people. congressman will speak for 20 to 25 minutes followed by questions. ariel? if you could stand up?

a student at the university of pennsylvania in a course called dealing with the media will actually deal with you and take the microphone around and make sure you do not abuse the privilege of the questions, ok? as please send a fire self u.s. questions. identify your name and organization. questions but not speeches, please. i also want to thank richard mann, right here. thank you. my staff also assisted. and the staff of the national press club, as well as the "newsmakers" chair, and

congressman staff, sophia simmons, jennifer hoffman, jean roscoe, jimmy fine fernagain. jimmy? >> yes, you got it. >> and carlos [indiscernible] it seems that someone to treat gum legislation as an april fool's joke. or they want to wait until the next massacre to bring attention back to it. today "the washington post," the lead story is pro-gun targeting key bills. i am going to read the first three paragraphs. "gun control measures that seemed desperate to become law after the school shooting in newtown, conn., are under jeopardy after the lobbying campaign from gun advocates. senators have been unable to find support within the system for background checks, something nine out of 10 people support. gun trafficking a federal crime could be gutted if lawmakers except new language being circulated by the national rifle association. should we not all be outraged? so, clearly the congressman is a leader in the field and one

that we must year from today. the national press club is the place where news is made and today we are so thrilled that you are here to do it. congressman elijah cummings. >> thank you very much, mr. wiener for your kind introduction. i am indeed honored to be here this morning. it is always a present -- a tremendous honor to be in the presence of my wife, i would like to thank her for being here today as well. today i want to talk about an issue that is extremely personal for me and my family. that is the issue of gun violence. in june of 2011 i lost my nephew, christopher. lost him to a senseless act of gun violence. christopher was just 20 years old. he was a student at old dominion university in norfolk, virginia. like the beautiful children who lost their lives at sandy hook,

he was an amazing young man with his entire life ahead of him. it is a painful thing to see your nephew, your son, or your daughter, to see their blood splattered over walls and couches, or wherever they may have been killed. like countless others, i was living to the unimaginable suffering of losing a loved one due to gun violence. the pain that i feel in my heart today, even these years later. last week during a press conference urging the country not to forget the massacre in newtown, the president was joined by mothers who are fighting the legislation to reduce gun violence. let me tell you, i fully understand their passion. i fully understand their pain. i also fully understand their purpose. because when you lose a family member like that, you just do not mourn them at their funeral. you mourn them every single day

of your life. you mourn for the person they could have been. for children murdered at five years old, six years old, as they were at sandy hook, you mourn every missed a birthday, every graduation, every christmas, and that is right, every easter. every milestone list is a reminder of the life they could have led had they not been so

cruelly and violently stashed away. not only are we morning we lost, but remembering what could have been. this loss leads to great passion. but it just does not lead to great passion in family members. it leads to great passion in those who hear about these incidents. those who were the neighbors and friends of these children. those who went to church with them. the passion is deep and powerful. i am thoroughly convinced that that passion must be to change.

-- need to change. we will keep fighting for gun safety legislation. i will be fighting for that legislation until i die. i want to start today by talking about our fight against the problem of gun trafficking straw purchasing, which i have been working on for several years. the bipartisan forum but i organize last month included first responders and law- enforcement officials who were victims of gun trafficking crimes. far too often it is our brave law enforcement officers and first responders who find themselves on the wrong end of a gun barrel. i want to share some of their stories with you today, lest we never forget.

we need to constantly remind ourselves of these stories so that they are printed within dna of our brains as we debate the gun issue. one of these brave men is ted kazino. the fire alarm, the fire, turned out to be an ambush set by a name -- a man named william spangler, a convicted felon who served 17 years in prison for killing his 92-year-old grandmother with a hammer. despite his history of violence, spangler convinces neighbor to buy the 12 gauge shotgun and bushmaster rifle that he used to murder two firefighters and injured two others, including mr. scardino.

here are the pictures of the two firefighters that lost their lives that day. 19-year-old thomas [indiscernible] and his mentor, might chiapperini. he left behind -- mike chiapperini. a reality check, he left behind a wife and children. that is the reality check. they are no longer with us. they're dead. ofalso heard about the loss one of his own officers in pennsylvania. officer fox encountered and her thomas, a convicted felon who

swerved into oncoming traffic -- andrew thomas, a convicted felon who swerved into oncoming traffic. for some reason a straw purchaser willingly bought seven handguns and two rifles for this killer, even though he was a convicted felon. something is awfully wrong with that picture. officer fox was only 34 years old. he was one of our heroes. he was in iraq war veteran who returned home as a hero. he left behind a pregnant wife and a daughter. that is the reality. the chief told us that he was like a son to him.

at the forum we heard from a san francisco police chief. the chief described a gun trafficking ring that stretched from georgia, rural georgia, california. it involved hundreds of firearms. as a matter of fact, the chief told us that a lot of people are convicted felons there are looking for ways to be legally make money. instead of going into drug crack -- drug trafficking, the

going to drug trafficking -- gun trafficking. he was concerned that we needed a dedicated law to address this gaping loophole. many of these firearms, by the way, wind up in the streets of the bay area. they are recovered at crime scenes across oakland and the bay area. including those areas including armed robbery suspects. one of them fell into the hands of a convicted felon. multiple gang members and drug traffickers. ladies and gentlemen, let's be clear. this problem is everywhere. it is not just sandy hook, not just baltimore, not just a rural georgia. just last week there were reports of another straw purchasing incident in colorado, which i am sure that you heard about. a convicted felon shot and killed colorado possible prison chief and a pizza delivery man. -- colorado's prison chief and a pizza delivery man. the shooter was on parole after east -- serving four years in prison for punching a prison guard in 2008. now, most americans