‘Every community is entitled to be safe, and the good people in every community want the criminals locked up,’ Sessions told NR.
Responding to a surge in violent crime, former U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions is urging the nation’s prosecutors to crack down on gun crime in order to deter other would-be lawbreakers. And after a wave of deadly mass shootings across the nation, including Monday’s shooting in Highland Park, Ill., Sessions is calling on federal law-enforcement leaders to take on a greater leadership role and to do more to help local agencies root out potential killers before they attack.
The former U.S. senator and tough-on-crime prosecutor from Alabama who served as Donald Trump’s attorney general in 2017 and 2018, told National Review in an exclusive interview that he’s skeptical of the idea that the bipartisan gun bill passed in June will do much to curb gun crime. That bill, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, mandated enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, provided federal funding for states that implement red-flag laws, and closed the so-called “boyfriend loophole” to prevent domestic abusers from obtaining firearms.
“There can be improvements in the laws, that’s for sure,” Sessions said of the new legislation, before identifying the “failure to prosecute existing laws,” as a more significant factor for increasing gun crimes.
Sessions blasted what he called “woke crime policies,” implemented by progressive prosecutors and mayors who reject serious sentences for many crimes. The surge in crime over the last two years has been a direct result of those soft-on-crime approaches, he said, and a “colossal disaster” that will likely take years to turn around.
“It’s just tragic. To throw away 40 years of improved law enforcement and reduced crime is a stunning error,” Sessions said. “The police departments warned the cities what would happen. But they were so obsessed with their version of how to fight crime that they didn’t listen.”
During his tenure as attorney general, Sessions ordered federal prosecutors to prioritize gun crime, putting a particular emphasis on illegal-possession cases. That often included transferring local gun cases to federal court, where punishment is typically more severe: Criminals convicted in federal court of possessing a gun while committing a crime face a minimum five-year sentence, which goes up if the gun is brandished or fired. Those sentences, and other tough-on-crime measures implemented in the 1980s and ’90s, have been credited with putting an end to the crime surge seen during the 1960s and ’70s.
“Homicides dropped by half in America,” said Sessions, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama from 1981 to 1993. “If you told people in 1980 that we were going to reduce homicides in America by 50 percent in twelve years, they wouldn’t believe it.”
“Our view was, in the ’80s and into the ’90s, criminals learned that if they used a firearm or carried one during their drug crimes or other crimes, that they were likely to be taken to federal court, and would receive a mandatory five years, basically, without parole,” Sessions said.
As attorney general, he used a similar approach to disincentivize criminals from carrying guns.
“If a gang member sees his buddy get caught with a gun and goes for five years without parole, unlike the state system in many cases, that gets their attention. Why? Well, he carried a gun. If you don’t carry a gun, they won’t take you to federal court, and you won’t get a serious sentence, likely. So, it reduces the number of guns on the street,” he said, adding that gun prosecutions need to be swift, and punishment needs to be certain. “One of the things that I’m confident is true and has been proven true, that swiftness and certainty of punishment is a better deterrent than inconsistencies, long delays, and soft sentences.”
During the Obama administration, former attorney general Eric Holder directed prosecutors to avoid gun charges that carried a mandatory five-year sentence. That was followed by increases in violent crime and murders in 2015 and 2016. Sessions vowed to turn things around.
When Sessions submitted his requested resignation letter to Trump in 2018, he boasted that U.S. attorneys under his watch had “prosecuted the largest number of violent offenders and firearm defendants in our country’s history,” noting that “after two years of rising violent crime and homicides prior to this administration, those trends have reversed.”
Sessions said that during his tenure he did put a priority on going after straw buyers — people who buy guns for criminals who can’t legally buy them on their own — but those cases are often difficult to prosecute and are relatively small in number.
“There are lots and lots of guns out there,” he said. “So, somebody buys a gun, and somebody else gets it and kills somebody, the buyer will often say, you know, ‘They stole it from me.’ Whatever the excuse is. And they’re not as bad as a person who kills somebody. That’s the No. 1 criminal.”
Sessions also argued that it is a mistake to focus on gun laws that infringe on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners. “How many people do you know that are likely to murder somebody?” he asked rhetorically. “Law-abiding Americans with guns are not committing violent crimes. It’s the criminals with guns that are committing violent crimes. So the focus should be not on the people exercising their Second Amendment rights, but on the people who violate the law. . . . To me, sometimes it seems like there’s a desperate attempt on the part of the Left to avoid anything that actually puts somebody in jail. As crime reduced so dramatically in places like New York, people got overconfident.”
He also said it’s a “big mistake” for law-enforcement officers and prosecutors to look at cracking down on gun crimes through a racial lens. Critics of Sessions’s methods have complained that racial minorities are disproportionately charged and prosecuted for gun crimes. But Sessions said ignoring those crimes, or limiting policing in minority communities is “racially insensitive.”
“Every community is entitled to be safe, and the good people in every community want the criminals locked up, whatever race. But in recent years, that insight was lost,” he said. “When I was U.S. attorney in Mobile, Alabama, I met with local African-American leaders, and they wanted more police, not less.”
Sessions said “good people” in a community have every right to review police policies, and to insist that there are effective programs for disciplining officers who do wrong. “But that’s not what the Black Lives Matter and the Antifa wanted,” he said. “Did you ever hear them say, ‘We want to meet with the police and try to improve law enforcement, and make our communities safe?’ They just never did. So, these were not people of good faith, like the people I dealt with in Mobile in the ’80s. They wanted police to behave, to be disciplined, and they wanted public safety, too.”
Reports from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show that since the mid-1980s, federal weapons prosecutions have generally risen during Republican presidential administrations and fallen during Democratic administrations. Sessions said he doesn’t expect that pattern to change during Joe Biden’s administration.
“Under his watch, crime has surged. And it is the duty of the attorney general, who is the top law-enforcement officer in America, to respond and develop plans that will reduce crime, and not preside over ever-increasing crime,” Sessions said, adding that he believes Attorney General Merrick Garland will “be judged pretty soon.”
During his tenure, Garland’s Justice Department has veered left on a variety of issues, including immigration enforcement and the death penalty. To reduce gun violence, Garland has established gun-trafficking strike forces in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., “to disrupt the pipelines that flood our communities with illegal guns,” he said in an April speech. He’s also said he’s targeting straw buyers.
“I mean, you absolutely should go after gun traffickers,” Sessions said. “But the gun is not a killer. It’s the person who carries the gun that’s the killer. And executing policies that reduce the number of guns carried by violent criminals will, in fact, reduce violence, and gun violence in particular. It just will. There’s no mystery about it. But there seems to be a reluctance under Democratic administrations to actually prosecute criminals, and actually incarcerate people who are threats to the community.”
Sessions acknowledged the difficulty of curbing the actions of mass shooters, who often have no serious criminal record and legally buy the weapons they use to gun people down in schools, grocery stores, and other public locations. He sees the problem as being more closely tied to mental health than the availability of firearms. He also said that the phenomenon deserves more attention from researchers who can help policy-makers understand who the shooters are, what motivates them, and how they turn the corner from being emotionally disturbed to cold-blooded killers. “If we knew more, then you could perhaps intervene more aggressively,” Sessions said.
In recent decades, law-enforcement officers have become much more attuned to the signs of spousal abuse and domestic violence and are more likely to intervene before things escalate, Sessions noted. Federal law-enforcement officials should take a greater leadership role in efforts to train local police to similarly identify potential shooters and to intervene before they have a chance to attack, he argued. “No police chief wants to have a situation in the future where the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the state attorney general say, ‘We need to do A, B, and C,’ and they didn’t do it, and somebody kills five people,” Sessions said.
Sessions said he suspects crime and surging violence will be major issues in this year’s elections and again in 2024. “A good Republican candidate needs to understand the crime issue and be able to talk about it,” he said.
Sessions said he hasn’t decided whom to throw his support behind in the 2024 presidential primary, but he believes Republicans have a number of talented potential candidates.
“There’s some strength showing up out there,” he said. “I like [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis. And we’ll see whether Trump’s numbers hold or start sinking. That will be interesting.”