Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing George Joseph.
He wrote this really important piece for TheAppeal.org.
Jeff Sessions left behind a record-breaking gun prosecution machine.
Welcome back to the show, George.
How you doing?
Hey, thanks for having me.
I'm doing well.
Good.
Very happy to have you here.
Geez, the subhead here reads, the program was supposed to target leading violent offenders.
Today, it's sweeping up low-level and disproportionately black defendants.
Chalk this one up to the old NRA slogan, no new gun laws, just vigorously enforce the ones that we already have.
Huh?
Some of that?
Yeah, it's exactly that, actually.
Basically, the context is, since the early 90s, with moral panics over the rising crime rate, federal prosecutors increasingly began taking more what would be, in the past, low-level state gun cases.
What that means is, especially in states in the South, like Alabama, where we focus on the story and other places, you're facing much harsher penalties, on average, five years for a crime such as felon gun possession.
That also means that you're being sent far away from home to prisons, far away from your family.
It also means no parole.
No parole, exactly.
Since the early 90s, more and more of those cases have been taken on by the feds.
It reached its height up until now, in the middle of the Bush administration, under Holder and with Obama.
It went down to some degree, not to nothing, but certainly down to some degree.
Within a year and a half of Sessions coming into power, those gun prosecution numbers surpassed the Bush numbers, reaching a rate we've never seen before at the federal level.
All right.
Now, you start off with this story of Adarius Sims.
That's a pretty good way to write.
Give me somebody to care about here, rather than just some statistics.
Sure.
Mr. Sims is a guy who's currently facing federal gun charges.
His story is really instructive about how these kinds of cases happen.
In 2015, he was just driving home, had come back from hanging out with some friends, was tired at the wheel, got into a car crash.
He was taken to the hospital for a head injury, but when the cops were at the scene, as his car was being towed away, one of them noticed that he had a handgun on the right side of his car.
So, because Alabama law is relatively permissive, compared to federal law at least, that finding of that gun possession resulted in a state gun charge because he had a felony record.
Now, if you allow me, the felony record was simply because of two marijuana possession charges, which he had gotten at the state level.
And in Alabama, two marijuana possession charges makes you a felon.
So, he's this guy who's from public housing.
Wait, wait, just so I understand that, you say two separate misdemeanor marijuana possessions add up to, it becomes a felony if it happens to you twice?
In Alabama.
Which we've reported on, actually, at the appeal.
But anyway, because of that status, here's this guy with a completely non-violent record who lives in a very violent part of Birmingham in public housing.
And now that he has kids, he feels a need to have a gun.
So, he has a gun, even though he knows that it's a risk.
But he has one because he wants to protect his family.
Again, as I said, at the state level, the laws are a bit more permissive.
So, especially in Birmingham, where they understand, you know, what really violent cases are like, they let him go to what's called gun court, which is a way you can work off your charges without going to prison.
And you kind of just take these BS classes on, you know, anger management, that kind of thing.
So, he was doing that, but at the same time, an ATF agent met with him and said, Hey, buddy, we know you have this gun charge on you, and we can actually charge you for it federally, even though you've already, you know, agreed, plead to it at the local level.
We can still hold that over you, but we're not going to because we see your record.
But what happens two years later when Sessions comes to power, all the way in D.C., is that he tells all his federal prosecutors, which are known as U.S. attorneys, I want you guys to prioritize cases like felon gun possession cases.
And this is part of his larger, quote unquote, tough on crime approach.
So, all of a sudden, federal prosecutors are going back over years old dockets and identifying cases like Mr. Sims, where they can get an easy conviction.
So, in the case of Mr. Sims, they see an old case from two years ago, where a guy already pled guilty to having an illegal gun.
But now, at the federal level, they can charge him for that same gun and ask for a max of 10 years if they want to.
So, fast forward two years later, they do exactly that.
And Mr. Sims, while working at a construction site, gets an angry call from his dad, being like, there's federal agents at my house, what's going on?
He cooperates, they come pick him up at work, and he hears that he's facing now federal charges for the exact same incident, which he had already adjudicated at the state level.
So now, he, in the next few weeks, is awaiting his sentencing, and is hoping that a judge will be lenient because of the circumstances in his history with that gun case.
But all this likely wouldn't have happened if Sessions hadn't reinvigorated this federal gun prosecution program.
Well now, but enlighten me though, because if he says, that listen, I want you to go after real bad guys, people who have committed real crimes, then how come they're going after a guy who got caught with a bag of pot a couple of times instead?
Well, I did a lot of interviews in the piece with cops and county level prosecutors, and what they said was, even though the message is target, what they really do is net.
And so, if you are on the one hand being told to go after the worst of the worst, but on the other hand, are being judged as a federal prosecutor by DC on how many gun cases you rack up, you're going to go after the easiest ones, which are cases, low-level cases like Mr. Sims' case.
And so, we did an analysis of the U.S. attorney in northern Alabama, J. Towne, and an announcement he made a few months ago about this big quote-unquote gun roundup of what he called the trigger pullers, the worst of the worst.
And when we looked at the cases, the documents indicated that most of these were just kind of random police stops, police responding to a citizen call, or police just stopping someone for a traffic infraction, finding a gun in the car, and then arresting a person because they had a felony record.
So, these aren't police doing investigations into people who are killing people on a regular basis.
These are police just randomly getting cases and then sending them federal because they know it means more time.
And that's what's happening all across the country.
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And now, you know what though?
They've had university professors and entire segments of academia dedicated not just to the study of criminals but to the study of criminal justice and the incentive structures.
And how come every time I read anything about this it's, on the face of it, total amateur hour?
Yeah, we want you to go after the very highest quality busts and how we're going to measure that is in raw body count.
Get out there and get to work.
Well, what do they think is going to happen?
Any stupid idiot could tell them that whoever makes those rules that the results are going to be that they just go and round up the lowest hanging fruit.
Give me a break.
The people in charge of this policy should go to prison.
Well, someone like Sessions is very clear despite his rhetoric about targeted and narrow sort of criminal prosecutions.
When he talks about what he considers to be violent crime, he says that anyone who has a gun and a felony record, for example, a drug dealer, has to be violent.
He just has this very almost religious sense of what a violent versus non-violent person is.
And often that view has quite a racial lens on it.
And so if you're coming from that mindset, you may view any black man with a felony record and a gun as a violent person.
And so in that world view, going after these kind of low level cases makes more sense.
I guess that's true.
And in fact, I remember a few years ago, two or three years ago, there was an article in The New York Times where they were absolutely shocked to find out that there are black people who are not muggers who carry guns and who own them and go to the gun range and practice shooting them.
And sometimes just for fun, not even because they live in the ghetto and are scared, but they just like guns the way, you know, the way other humans do.
And it was like, it was like they had, you know, stepped through some quantum field into a new reality that they couldn't have possibly imagined before.
And those are the open minded ones.
Well, I certainly saw that in Birmingham.
A lot of people from West Birmingham, which is the majority poor black side of town, feel like, you know, they say exactly what the NRA says.
This is my second right, second amendment.
Yet, why is that being taken away from me because of this, you know, felony rule doesn't say in the Constitution that felons aren't allowed to have guns.
Somehow we've made these rules that effectively create a caste based right to the second amendment.
And the NRA obviously doesn't stand up for those people's gun rights.
Right.
Well, the NRA doesn't ever really stand up for anybody's gun rights.
I mean, we really need entire separate organization.
I mean, there really are a gun lobby group that represents gun manufacturers whose primary interest in government is not protecting the rights of civilian gun owners.
Their interest in government is getting big contracts for the cops and for the soldiers to carry guns that are, you know, manufactured by the companies that sponsor the NRA.
That doesn't have a damn thing to do with the second amendment.
They've done nothing but promote gun control laws since the 1960s.
And so I wonder what it would look like to have a pro gun rights organization in America.
You know, I think you had gun owners of America, but that guy Pratt was right wing enough that he turned off, you know, regular gun owners, I think, in big ways.
And I think NRA really sucks up a lot of that oxygen because people just assume.
But like, remember when the cop murdered Philandro Castile, the black man that he pulled over, forget this, having a wide set nose and therefore being a perfect description, a match of a robber from a previous day, pulled him over.
The guy said, I have a gun permit.
And he said, well, don't reach for your gun.
And he goes, OK.
But he's reaching for his driver's license, as the cop told him to do.
And the cop just panicked and shot him.
And people said, hey, how come the NRA isn't standing up for this guy's rights?
It must be just because he's black.
And then, but the real answer was, when has the NRA ever stood up for the rights of an innocent American civilian who got killed by a cop, no matter what the color of their skin?
It's just people's imagination that they're there for white people either.
They're not.
They never were.
And what I'll say is that our findings, you know, the conversations I was having in Birmingham among people with felony records supposed to carry guns was very much a risk analysis.
They live in such dangerous neighborhoods that they feel short-term risk and need to carry, you know, beyond just liking guns.
And they know that carrying that gun is a risk due to a potential police stop, which could result in prison time.
But they choose to carry anyway, knowing those risks.
And that is a finding that certainly can be applied to many other cities.
There was a recent survey with hundreds of young people from south and west sides of Chicago, which found that the vast majority of young gun holders said that they would continue to carry, even if they knew for certain that they would be stopped by police or even face prison time.
Which shows you how these kind of programs just punish people for choosing to carry when they need to.
Right.
Which is, you know, what right-wing anti-gun control people always say is that, hey, you know, this only punishes, gun control laws only punish the law abiding, the criminals don't even think twice about whether they're going to carry a gun.
Now you're making this guy choose his short-term survival versus the risk of going to the penitentiary, which could ruin his entire family, his kids' lives, and God knows what all.
You know, and then also we should also remember, too, that this isn't some kind of fairy tale USA civics class where you're innocent until you're proven guilty.
And then, but once you're convicted, then we all accept that you really did something.
I don't think so.
Just because someone has a felony conviction, as far as I know, they're a hero.
And the judge and the prosecutor are guilty conspires in a kidnapping case who framed up some innocent guy on some trumped up charges on some victimless crime.
Like you mentioned before with, you know, the star of your story here, not even crack, he just had a couple of bags of pot at two different times in his life.
And they pretend that that makes him a criminal.
Well, that doesn't make him a criminal.
Right?
That doesn't even make him a pot businessman.
That only makes him a pot consumer.
And that's not wrong.
So, you know, let him have a hundred guns.
It's incredible to think that we would take the government's word for it that just because someone is convicted of a felony.
We also know that hardly anyone gets a fair trial of any kind.
The way every prosecutor does it in every county in this country is they charge you with so many things that you plead guilty to something.
Otherwise, you're facing decades.
And so you go away and everybody knows that that's how it worked.
The whole system is corrupt.
The whole system is not worth believing in.
So then how can we make a felony conviction the basis for further persecution when a felony conviction doesn't mean a thing necessarily?
And what I'll say is that when the U.S. Attorney J. Towne in northern Alabama announced his May gun roundup, Mr. Sims was one of the so-called violent offenders that he kind of heralded to the local media and the local press, AL.com, for example, published the mugshots of all these people before they had even gone to trial and kind of packaged them as part of the so-called violent gang members caught up in this so-called raid.
Yeah, just to publicly disgrace them and humiliate them and treat them like they'd done something.
Yeah, effectively, yes.
Yeah, as propaganda.
Well, and you know what, too?
I mean, I don't know.
This is a little bit and I've been doing some ranting on your interview here.
It's a little bit outside of what you've written about here.
But it's important, right, that it's the liberal left mostly who supports gun control in this country.
Correct.
And in their imagination, that means, I guess, what a bunch of redneck Branch Davidians are going to get it.
And so good.
And yet, in reality, it's the very people that they claim to be champions of racial and economic minorities, people who are minorities in terms of power and status in society.
Of course, they're the ones who get it the worst, the people who are the easiest to prosecute, the people who are less likely to have an uncle who's a judge, or any connection to anyone who can help protect them from this kind of persecution.
And to a prosecutor, this is just business, right?
This is just the same as flipping hamburgers.
You put them in, you put them on the grill, you get them out the door.
Yeah, these cases are especially easy to process.
And in a sense, what we found was that the vast majority of these federal cases were happening in the South.
But that could be in part because of ideological affiliation with Sessions.
But on the other hand, when you are in a place like New York or Illinois, where the minimums for these kind of cases are already higher on the state level, that may help explain why more of these cases are happening federally in the South.
But it points to the same problem all across the country, even in so-called liberal states.
Right.
And you know, I mean, seriously, gun ownership is a very sobering thing, right?
Nothing makes you feel more responsible than carrying a gun, unless you really are a criminal type who is really interested in using a gun to commit crimes.
The kind of people who carry guns usually are very kind of civic-minded sort of protector, shepherd folk in their families and in their communities and are the types who carry a gun in order to protect themselves and others, not for any other reason.
And so people just have it in their head all wrong.
I talked to a bunch of guys in West Birmingham who talked about why they carried.
And a lot of them, I mean, these were people with felony records, so obviously it was a risk for them to carry.
What they would say is that they wouldn't carry all the time because of the risk from police of getting caught.
But what they would do is kind of be aware of their surroundings.
And if they were going to a neighborhood where they weren't familiar, that's when they would carry just so they could ward off potential threats or just kind of have guns somewhere where they know they could access them if need be.
But there was a story which I was able to include.
In other words, just like what anyone would say, right?
Just like any other person, whether you've met them before and know what they look like or not.
There's a story that I wasn't able to include.
A guy that I met, we'll call him E.
He's a father.
He has a felony record for a crime from over a decade ago.
And he was telling me about how he's scared right now of being federally prosecuted.
One day, suddenly learning that he's going to get federal gun charges because a few months ago he was driving with a friend to a gas station.
The friend went out to take a piss.
So he was in the car and his friend had left his gun in the car.
But there was another guy in the back, a guy from the neighborhood, who was high on synthetic marijuana.
So he, wanting to make sure everything was safe with the situation, took the gun and put it in his waistband.
He goes out to the gas station.
By the time he gets back, he hears police saying, get on the ground.
And just like that, because this guy who was high and paranoid told the police that he and his friend were robbing them, he was caught with this gun.
Now, the guy ended up dropping the charges because he had just been high and said some bullshit.
But this guy, who was just trying to make sure everyone was safe in the situation, is now potentially could get federal charges just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a gun in his waistband.
So I think that story illustrates the degree to which in these kind of neighborhoods, people can just be randomly in situations with guns and the consequences for them can be tremendous at the federal or even state level without regards to their individual circumstances.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the whole thing about this.
It's just how, you know, practically speaking, how ruthless this is.
When you're talking about people who actually really didn't do anything to anyone, they're in trouble for possession, just like with drugs.
And oftentimes, as you're saying, drugs are the predicate for them being in worse trouble for the gun.
And then they haven't necessarily shot at anybody, didn't necessarily do anything.
As you say, a lot of these people just got pulled over and then admitted they had a gun or the cops found it or the cops saw it, that kind of thing.
Or someone called the cops on them for having their stereo too loud or some kind of innocuous thing.
These are not, as you say, investigations into who are the most dangerous gangster, criminal murderers in this section of town.
But that's what they claim.
They claim we have prior intelligence which led us to get these cases.
But with a case like Mr. Sims, you can see that's just a lie because there was no intelligence to get him.
They just dug up an old court record and then got him.
And how ruthless is this society?
Overall, we just don't care.
We don't have a problem.
But just think of people out there.
They took you away, locked you away in a cage where you're not there to protect your kids.
You're not there to raise your kids and take care of your greatest priorities.
Your sick mom or whatever it is because the government's got you locked in a cage like an animal over a possession charge, over not doing anything to anyone.
And this is the federal government that is doing this?
The U.S. Constitution is 1787.
They don't have the slightest jurisdiction in a million years to be doing this.
Yeah, and it's interesting that you bring that up.
The public defenders at the federal level in northern Alabama are actually in court attempting to argue that the federal government shouldn't be able to use this kind of double jeopardy tactics taking a case federal that has already been adjudicated at the state level but we'll see where that goes.
They are currently doing it.
Yeah, well, I'm sure the judges will let it slide.
They always side in favor of themselves.
All right, well, listen, this is great journalism.
I really appreciate that you care enough to focus on this and do such great work.
And it really is great work, everybody.
Please check it out.
It's at theappeal.org.
Jeff Sessions left behind a record-breaking gun prosecution machine.
He's gone, but it's not.
But it's the profiles of these different people and all kinds of statistics and explanations of gun carrying in these different communities who are being most heavily persecuted here, et cetera, and all the history.
Really great work.
And thank you again, George.
Hey, thanks for having me, Scott.
It was fun.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
