The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, H.R. 3355, Pub.L. 103-322, was an act of Congress dealing with crime and law enforcement that became law in 1994. It is the largest crime bill in the history of the US at 356 pages and will provide for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs which were designed with significant input from experienced police officers. Sponsored by U.S. Representative Jack Brooks of Texas, the bill was originally written by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
Following the 101 California Street shootings, the 1993 Waco Siege, and other high-profile instances of violent crime, the act expanded federal law in several ways. One of the most noted sections was the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Other parts of the act provided for a greatly expanded federal death penalty, new classes of individuals banned from possessing firearms, and a variety of new crimes defined in statutes relating to immigration law, hate crimes, sex crimes, and gang-related crime.
Read more about Violent Crime Control And Law Enforcement Act: Federal Assault Weapons Ban, Federal Death Penalty Act, Elimination of Inmate Education, Violence Against Women Act, Other Provisions
Famous quotes containing the words violent, crime, control, law and/or act:
“I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.”
—Edward Bond (b. 1934)
“You punish crimes committed, with us the thought of crime is a sin; you fear the voice of witness, we the sole voice of conscience.”
—Marcus Minucius Felix (2nd or 3rd cen. A.D.)
“He took control of me for forty-five minutes. This time I’ll have control over him for the rest of his life. If he gets out fifteen years from now, I’ll know. I’ll check on him every three months through police computers. If he makes one mistake he’s going down again. I’ll make sure. I’m his worst enemy now.”
—Elizabeth Wilson, U.S. crime victim. As quoted in People magazine, p. 88 (May 31, 1993)
“I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)