CLINTON: First of all, I do think that they have a right to do it, and a lot of people have guns… But if they do, they need to have child-safety locks on the guns, and they need to have them put in a place where kids can’t get to them… I don’t doubt that there are instances where people who are well trained and disciplined and know how to use their firearms may have made themselves safer. But I think that there are also a lot of instances where… it’s been a bigger problem.

I do… You know, I don’t have a perfect record on this. In 1982, when I was running for re-election as governor… I got a questionnaire that said, are you for a three-day waiting period, and I said, sure… And it stirred up the darnedest firestorm you ever heard. All of a sudden there were images that I was going to go have the state police go in people’s houses and take their guns away from them. And I took a dive on it. I walked away from it. I think it’s important to be blunt here. I felt this heat. But I always felt bad about it because I realized that we were caught in a culture where labels were more important than facts and reality… Al Gore is a good messenger because… he’s been around this culture all his life, and he ought to be able to effectively communicate that we’re not trying to stop anybody from hunting or sports shooting or even protecting themselves; but we are trying to increase the safety of our children and keep guns out of the hands of criminals and kids…

Well, I don’t think he can do anything about it… He’ll say, oh, well, they won’t have undue influence on me. That guy from the NRA, when he said, “We’ll have an office in the White House if George Bush gets elected,” I don’t think he literally meant that [NRA executive vice president Wayne] LaPierre will be given an office in the White House… I think he meant that they will have complete access and that nothing will happen that they don’t want to happen…

I know they do.

If you go back and look at how many statements I made on this, how hard I lobbied for this and how hard we worked for it, I don’t know what else I could have done. Maybe an Oval Office address would have made a difference, but I doubt it… I really believed after Columbine that we would get something done… But you’ve got to hand it to the NRA, they were strong enough to kill it all.