President Bush paid a visit to the City of Brotherly Love last week, trumpeting a federally sponsored program that aims to reduce gun violence in America.
The program -- called Project Safe Neighborhoods -- is expected to cost more than $550 million over a two year period. Bush said that the money would be spent on 713 new federal and state prosecutors, in addition to community outreach efforts to better enforce existing gun laws.
"We're going to reduce gun violence in America, and those who commit crimes with guns will find a determined adversary in my administration," Bush said Monday at a Philadelphia police promotions ceremony at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
The program is based on the successful implementation of programs such as "Operation Cease-fire" in Philadelphia and Boston, as well as "Project Exile" in Richmond, Va. All of these strategies employ a greater use of federal prosecution -- which carries stiffer sentences -- in crimes involving guns.
In Richmond, for example, this resulted in a 40 percent reduction in homicides and a 30 percent drop in armed robberies in the first year alone. Philadelphia's homicides are down 21 percent from the same time last year, according to officials.
"These are tremendous success stories, and ones that are worth duplicating around our nation," Bush said.
Almost half the money allocated for the program will be made available this year, the president said, including $44 million to improve state criminal record-keeping to help keep guns out of criminals' hands.
The new federal attorneys provided for in Project Safe Neighborhood will act as full-time "gun prosecutors." They will form alliances with other federal and local officials to "ensure a uniform and comprehensive approach to reduce gun violence," according to Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was also in attendance.
Community outreach efforts -- such as advertising to warn potential offenders -- will be another feature of the program in order to build "awareness that those who use guns in committing crimes indeed will have to understand and endure the consequences," Ashcroft said.
Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham said Bush's program will benefit the city.
"It's a very good adjunct to what we're already doing," she said after Bush's remarks. "I love the program -- I really do."
Bob Sarp, president of the Philadelphia-based American Gun Owners Association, also agreed with Bush's traditional Republican stance of improved enforcement of existing gun laws, rather than the addition of new laws.
"Where you have stiffer gun control you have higher crime rates because [criminals] know the people are less likely to be armed," Sarp said. "But if people don't know who's carrying and who's not, they're less likely to attack them."
But other groups across the country believe that new gun laws remain the answer.
"We certainly want enforcement, but we also don't want to wait until after we have a dead child," said Mary Leigh Blek, president of the Million Mom March Foundation, a national organization dedicated to preventing gun violence.
Blek said that other issues need to be addressed as well -- including more and better inspections of gun shows and firearms dealers. These are cheaper alternatives, she said.
"Then we won't need to have those expensive prosecutors and those expensive jail sentences," Blek added.
Although Ashcroft said that accountability -- in the form of measuring the reduction of crime -- will be a tenet of the program, Jerry Lee Center of Criminology Director Lawrence Sherman said that more rigorous testing is required to achieve the desired results.
"The question is not whether crime is down -- because crime is down anyway -- but whether Project Exile caused crime to go down," Sherman said about the model for the national program. "There's not a shred of evidence about whether Project Exile caused gun crime to drop."
Sherman believes that the whole premise of Bush's plan -- that gun crimes are committed by people with prior records -- is flawed. Rather, the opposite is true, according to his research.
"It's kind of like saying that most sex is committed by virgins," he said.
