We can begin to address the issue of guns by teaching our young people how to deal with situations in nonviolent ways. Someone said to me the other day, "What our adolescents need is not so much health care, but healthy caring," and I agree. Parents and churches need to provide that. Curricula in our schools [need to] provide that.

The evidence is overwhelming that marijuana can relieve certain types of pain, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms caused by such illnesses as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS - or by the harsh drugs sometimes used to treat them. And it can do so with remarkable safety. Indeed, marijuana is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe every day.

[We must] deal with all of the contributing factors to gun violence as a whole, because it's like a leaky bucket - if you've got a bucket with six holes shot through it, [and] you plug up five, you've still got a leaky bucket.

We know that there are several predisposing factors to gun violence: poverty, lack of education, lack of good parenting, lack of jobs, living in an environment where violence is seen every day, all the time. And children being born to children are likely to have all of these predisposing factors.

I don't know how anybody can say that who looks at what's happening to our young people and what's happening to our country, all because of guns. The NRA is putting themselves in a position where people will no longer trust them. They've been trusted in the past, but now their credibility is on the line.

Guns kill more teenagers than the other big killers - heart disease, cancer, and AIDS - combined.

I've pretty much always used my positions as a bully pulpit. What that means is strongly advocating for the things I feel are really important. Gun violence, to me, is the highest-priority public-health issue, and I have to make sure Congress is aware of it, the American people are aware of it, the president is aware of it, and that we all begin together to develop policies to exterminate the disease - the epidemic, really - of gun violence.