On several occasions, President Clinton has overpraised the effects of the Brady handgun bill, critics charge. Moreover, they are taking the Justice Department to task for inflating the numbers concerning denial of handguns to felons and others.

• The Justice Department announced Sunday that presale handgun checks resulted in 69,000 people being denied permission to purchase handguns in 1997 -- at the same time the White House put the figure at "hundreds of thousands."

• After a 1996 Justice Department report asserted that 60,000 were barred by the Brady Act from buying guns, Clinton put the figure at 100,000.

• The Indianapolis Star News reported that the Justice Department overstated by more than 1,300 percent the number of handguns that were blocked in Indiana in 1997.

• Justice's statistics forArizona reportedly overstated the number by more than 30 percent.

A 1996 General Accounting Office report concluded that almost half of the rejections under the Brady Act were due to paperwork problems or traffic violations -- not criminal records.

A White House spokeswoman has admitted that Clinton's top advisor on gun control "misspoke on that one" when he asserted on NBC's Meet the Press earlier this month that "20 percent of the guns used in murder are purchased within a week of the murder."