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If we were really tough on crime, we'd try to save our children from the desperation and deprivation that leave them primed for a life of crime.

Why does crime happen? Well, you might say that it's because youths don't have jobs. Or you might say that's because the doors of our buildings are not fortified enough. Given some limited funds to spend, you can either create yet another national employment program or you can equip houses with even better cameras, sensors, and locks.

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

We make violent cops, we make violent criminals, and no wonder we have shootouts in slums all of the time.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

We are not supposed to go out and kill all those we suspect to have committed a crime.

I think that when we're talking about youth violence, we're talking about kids who don't have opportunities, so they're engaged in a certain degree of lawlessness, because we as a society have failed them.

If we're going to spend a lot of money to deal with the problem of 200 million guns in the country owned by 65 million gun owners, we ought to have a system which will work and catch criminals.

There's good and evil going on. We have cops. We have robbers.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.