Why would somebody keep these individuals in the country? What's to be gained? But how much money are we talking about? And what are the Democrats, what are they doing?

We're talking about probably hundreds of billions of dollars in total.

But, you know, it's...

You hear these debates about how many people have a criminal record.

So the Department of Homeland Security will say that 70% of illegal aliens have a criminal record being defined as either convicted of a crime or they've been charged with a crime.

And then you have places like Cato and the Brennan Center, which will go and say, well, it's only 35%.

But they're only counting if you've been convicted.

So why would the Democrats want this system?

okay?

When you have the liberalization of abortion rules, you're going to have a lot more premarital sex among women who are willing to go and have an abortion, okay? There's a lot of evidence that indicates, both in terms of surveys and in terms of venereal disease rates, that when abortion was legalized, you had a lot more premarital sex that was occurring among women who are willing to have an abortion.

The problem is you have kind of a competitive dating market out there.

The women who are willing to have an abortion, they have more premarital sex.

But the women who aren't willing to have an abortion, they have more pressure on them to have premarital sex.

Because, you know, if, you know, the third date and there's not having premarital sex, the guy drops them and moves on to another woman where they can go and have premarital sex.

And so what you have is more premarital sex for both groups of women.

Okay.

So tell us what the Supreme Court is up to.

Right.

Well, there have been a number of or a couple of Democratic judges in the country that have put injunctions.

on the mail-in ballot reforms that the Trump administration was talking about.

The Supreme Court, a couple weeks ago, basically said, you can't put an injunction on people within the administration to even talk about what's happening.

So they knocked down that injunction, and then within 48 hours, the Democrat judge in Boston put a new injunction on.

And that was just talked about by the Supreme Court the beginning of this week, where they said, okay, well, now it's too close to the election.

like that.

Does it come down to, at the end of the day, doctor, what is more cost effective, the fiscal impact of delaying deportations or fiscal impact of carrying them out? Could you tell us that, please?

Well, I mean, surely the costs enter into the cost benefit calculations that you have there.

Obviously, the crimes that are committed by these individuals is something that makes a big difference there.

And, you know, a lot of the debate has evolved recently.

What is the definition of somebody having a criminal record? So the Department of Homeland Security will go and point out that 70% of the illegals that they've arrested have either been convicted or been charged with the crime.

in the United States.

Many of the others have been charged with crimes in their home countries.

Is that, in your opinion, would that be the best solution? I know it's not going to happen, but it seems a lot less costly than the others.

[laughs]

But, but the thing is, I, I don't think most people kinda understand the cost involved with actually going, having somebody go through the criminal justice system to convict them.

With, you have public defenders, the prosecutors, the cost, the court cost, the time that you're keeping them in jail while you're w- waiting for the, the procedures to occur.

Uh, you know, you could have a plea bargain, but if they decide that they wanna have a trial, obviously the costs are gonna be much greater then.

And so I just picked a recent case, uh, from a little bit over a week ago, uh, in northern Virginia, where, uh, an illegal alien had been caught acting as a drug dealer.

He was selling fentanyl to, uh, high school kids.

A couple kids had overdosed, had almost died.

Well, yeah.

Um, walk us through some of those costs and, uh, sort of the premise of your column.

Right.

Well, a lot of the debate has been over whether the illegals that are being p- arrested by the Department of Homeland Security have a criminal record.

Uh, Department of Homeland Security will say, "Well, seventy percent have either been convicted or charged with a crime." You have places like the Cato Institute and the Brennan Center, which will say, "Well, it's..." They, they say it's thirty-five percent have a criminal record, because they're just counting only whether somebody has been convicted of a crime.

And, uh, I just thought it'd be useful for people, as somebody who's been at the US Sentencing Commission and others.

I mean, as far as I know, every time I've worked in the federal government, part of your criminal record is whether you've been charged or arrested for crimes, not just whether you've been convicted.

But, uh, I don't think people appreciate how costly it is to go and have to go through the legal system, uh, to be able to go and convict somebody.

in the country illegally.

Walk us through some of those costs and sort of the premise of your column.

Right.

Well, a lot of the debate has been over whether the illegals that are being arrested by the Department of Homeland Security have a criminal record.

Department of Homeland Security will say, well, 70% have either been convicted or charged with a crime.

You have places like the Cato Institute and the Brennan Center, which will say, well, they say it's 35% have a criminal record because they're just counting only whether somebody has been convicted of a crime.

And I just... thought it'd be useful for people as somebody who's been at the U.S.

Sentencing Commission, others.

And

When we're told that white supremacy and white supremacist beliefs are the things that are the primary terror threat in America, do the statistics back that up?

No, I don't even think it's remotely true.

You know, we have data that we put together on so-called mass public shootings, cases where four or more people have been killed.

And if you look at the data from 1998 through the end of last year, anybody with any type of racist, white supremacist, anti-immigrant type view, any one of those categories, you're talking about something that's about 7% of Americans.

The cases, the vast majority of people well over 77% have no real political views one way or the other.

But even when you break down that 7% what you find is that most of those individuals.

are not right wing type people by any means.

Now, what about Islamic terrorism? What are the numbers on that?

All right, first off, tell me what your study found with this idea of defensive gun uses and how underestimated they actually are.

Well, it started with work that I did when I was working at the Department of Justice.

I was the senior advisor for research and statistics in 2020 and the beginning of 2021.

And one of the jobs that I had was to go and look at the FBI's active shooting reports.

And it was pretty clear even just looking at it quickly, that they had missed a number of very high-profile defensive gun uses that had occurred.

I pointed that out to them.

And since then, we've kind of done a deep dive filling in the numbers there.

But that most certainly is a defensive use of a firearm.

Narcan saved their lives, but then the cost of prosecuting this joker and then locking him up, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, aren't we?

Yeah.

[coughs] Well, I, I picked that.

It's not as costly to go through the legal system for, for that particular crime, uh, as heinous as it, as it is, would be as compared to any type of, uh, violent, uh, felony like rape, robbery, murder, aggravated assault.

All those are much more costly to go through.

And the reason for looking at this was just if, when you listen to the debate, so much of it is, well, we should only deport, and maybe not even always then, but only those who have been convicted of crimes.

Uh, you have a huge percentage, maybe 40% of those who have been deported, have been charged but yet not convicted of a crime, and I, I just want people to understand what the huge costs are involved to go the rest of the way through the legal system once you've charged somebody to actually convict them.

Yeah

Two separate conversations, but let's start with the CDC.

Right.

Well, uh, in 2013, the CDC had teamed up with the National Academy of Sciences to go and do a report on firearm violence, and one part of that dealt with the rate of defensive gun uses.

And for a while, for years, uh, they had had up the information that you just described from saying that there were 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year.

Uh, during the Biden administration, gun control groups had complained, uh, to the CDC, kind of in cahoots with the Biden administration, to get that information removed.

Uh, the gun control groups would make arguments like it was making it more difficult for them to go and pass the types of gun control laws that they wanted to get enacted, which is completely inappropriate for the Centers for Disease Control to take into account.

And it's kind of amazing that, uh, that the, uh, gun control people would make arguments like that.

Uh, tell me about that a little bit.

Yep

...

in, in violent crime during the Biden administration.

Uh, there are two measures that you have of crime.

There's the FBI data, uh, on crimes reported to police.

Uh, but we've known for well over a half a century that most crimes aren't reported to police.

Only about 40% of violent crimes are reported to police Only about 30% of property crimes are reported to police.

Yep.

victims of crime.

Uh, I mean, you'll have people like governor Westmore, uh, the governor of Maryland when, uh, Trump, uh, did the federalization of law enforcement in DC.

Uh, he said that, uh, Trump's move was racist.

Well, you know, the latest data we have for DC indicates that 96% of the people who are murdered in DC are blacks.

Well, So you have an 84% drop in murder rates now compared to before the federalization last year.

Whose lives do you think you saved as a result of that? And it's more than just the direct victims of violent crime, which obviously is extremely important.

Those are huge losses imposed upon people.

OK. Wow.

What will be the ramifications of that, John Lott?

Well, it's not difficult to figure out.

I mean – If you want to reduce crime, you have to make it riskier for criminals to commit crime.

It means higher arrest rates, higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences.

It means letting victims be able to go and defend themselves.

And at least I'll say the Democrats are consistent across the board.

They don't want to make it higher arrest rates.

Wow.

Take it away.

Thanks.

Yeah, well, so the gun control groups were... working with the Centers for Disease Control, and they were complaining, among other things, that the fact that the CDC was putting out that information on their website was making it more difficult for them to go and pass the types of gun control laws that they wanted.

And the CDC acquiesced and removed that information.

You know, whether the CDC removes it or not, taking into account that it's more difficult for an activist group to go and lobby should not be something that the CDC takes into account.

So as you mentioned, there's a range of different estimates.

Basically, they go from 60 or 100,000 for the National Crime Victimization Survey to others, which basically shows something around 2 million times.

That has to make you feel good.

Mm-hmm.

I was in Australia in February, as you know, and I don't know how many times different politicians from Obama to the Clintons to, uh, you know, uh, uh, Joe Biden, uh, as well as many other Democrats kept on pointing to Australia as something that we should mimic.

When, uh, when Brazil has had its different changes in gun control laws, there have been politicians in the United States that have pointed to it.

Um, and Argentina right now, uh, has a possibility of some really major changes, uh, that can occur with, uh, Milei as president.

Um, he's strongly, uh, he ran initially in favor of letting people have guns for protection.

Um, and, uh, his party, uh, doesn't yet have a majority in the Senate.

It's gonna probably take, uh, at least one more, uh, election cycle.

Maybe

I'll leave that to you.

Well, I mean, I guess that's what I always, uh, try to do when I travel, uh, is to educate people about crime issues.

Uh, and, uh, I was g- heading back to South America, down to Argentina.

They're considering, uh, um, some gun control legislation that would make it much easier for people to be able to go and get concealed carry permits.

Uh, they have a bad crime problem.

They've, uh, under Mele, they've loosened up, uh, to at least some extent the ability for people to get licenses to, uh, have guns for protection.

Uh, but they still have a long ways to go with regard to that, and he has been trying to get some legislation through, uh, the legislature down there.

John, do they have the same battles down there with anti-gun groups and organizations that are so well organized and funded like we do here? I'm curious about that.

Is that about right?

That's right.

So after the Bruen decision in 2002, which made it, struck down these may-issue laws where you had to go and get, you know, approval from some local public official to be able to go and get a concealed carry permit, you had four states that said, "Okay, well, if, if you're gonna make us give out permits, we're gonna make it so you can't carry any place." So essentially, you know, a state like Hawaii, about the only place you'd be able to go and carry is on your own property.

You, the way the rule was set up is that you'd have to go in advance.

If you're gonna stop at a gas station or a grocery store or anything else, you had to get permission, direct permission from the owner of the property there before you were able to go and carry your gun there.

And so they just wanted to try to make it as difficult as possible for people to be able to go and carry, and the Supreme Court struck that down.

But so going forward, are, are we at risk it, it sliding backwards into more gun control?

Well, I think a lot depends on the upcoming elections.

Is that a fair way to look at it?

Yeah, no, that's accurate.

You know, we recently did a study just to see how concentrated murders are in the United States And 2% of the counties, about 60 counties, account for 54% of the murders that are there.

They have about 30% of the population, but they account for 54% of the murders.

And if you look at what's called a murder map to see how the murders are distributed in those counties, you find that about two-thirds of all their murders take place within roughly 10 block areas.

So even within those counties, their murders are concentrated in very tiny areas.

So by contrast, 53% of the counties have zero murders, uh, a little bit over 16% have one murder.

Where are the crimes actually happening? Do you think I'm right in suspecting that even within the county, they're very, very centrally located within that county in specific areas, saying these are the places where most of the murders happen, and even the rest of the county is relatively murder-free or robbery-free?

I know where you're gonna go with this, but tell us how and why it's so important.

Well, I mean, uh, it's primarily important because it breaks a circuit s- uh, it creates a circuit split that we didn't previously have.

I, I guess it's not as important as it would have been maybe six months ago or something like that, 'cause normally the Supreme Court won't take cases unless there's some disagreement between the different circuits.

But it already granted cert, already granted, uh, that it would hear, uh, these assault weapons ban and magazine, uh, size limits, um, for the cases from Chicago and Connecticut even without the split.

But, um, it was still useful, uh, in the sense that, uh, you know, 98% of the time you normally get Republicans, Republican nominees to vote one way and Democrats to vote another way on these issues about protecting people's rights to self-defense.

And here you had the opinion was written by a, a, a Biden, uh, appointee who was striking down the bans.

You had, uh, other Democratic, uh, judges on the court who also voted the same way.

Wow.

Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of people are Democrats are claiming that this is somehow going to discriminate against blacks and Hispanics.

The weird thing is that the types of rules that they're talking about in the Save America Act, both in terms of government issued photo IDs and also proof of citizenship.

is something that you see in virtually all the rest of the world.

If you take something like Hispanics, for example, Mexico has rules that are essentially the same as the same America Act.

You have to have a government issued photo ID.

In fact, they even go beyond it.

You have to have certain biometric information like thumbprints and other things on it.

Well, I, and that is, that's flabbergasting to me.

Isn't that interesting? Go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah, well, you know, the thing is...

People don't appreciate how lax our system is for making sure we don't have vote fraud compared to the rest of the world.

You know, we have a lot of claims by Democrats that the SAVE Act, which would require an issued photo ID and proof of citizenship, would disenfranchise blacks or Hispanics.

But, you know, you look around the world.

Mexico and all the South American countries require government-issued photo IDs to vote and require proof of citizenship.

The rules for Mexico are identical to what's in the SAVE Act in terms of people providing a birth certificate or there's a list of other ID that can be used to show that.

People

Mm-hmm

... which, uh, is good in term-- for those who want to have fewer restrictions.

Um- Uh, she, she also went around for seventeen ninety-one.

Uh, I suppose the one thing that was a little weird was she was m-making the point that seventeen ninety-one was supportive of striking down the ban, but eighteen sixty-eight would've made it more difficult to strike down the ban.

Again, the conservatives had disagreed with her on that.

Uh, they said that, uh, either date would've been fine, uh, in terms of being able to go and strike down the ban.

But look, if eventually the Supreme Court's going to make a, a, a ruling on whether we should look at seventeen ninety-one or eighteen sixty-eight, I don't think, uh, when the, uh, Chicago and Connecticut assault weapons ban and magazine bans get up to the Supreme Court, probably we'll hear it in December.

It's a good reason.

It seems like it would just be a numbers game now.

I mean, if you want to reduce crime, you have to make it riskier for criminals to commit crime.

And you can do that with higher arrest rates, higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences, allowing victims to be able to go and defend themselves.

All those things have been changing under the Trump administration.

You know, you look at our measures of total crime during the Biden administration.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there was a 59 percent increase in felony violent crime.

That's the largest percentage increase that we'd seen over any four year period since they started recording that data by far.

Or the motives behind it, I should say.

It seems like it would just be a numbers game now.

I mean, if you want to reduce crime, you have to make it riskier for criminals to commit crime.

And you can do that with higher arrest rates, higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences, allowing victims to be able to go and defend themselves.

All those things have been changing under the Trump administration.

You know, you look at our measures of total crime during the Biden administration.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there was a 59 percent increase in felony violent crime.

That's the largest percentage increase that we'd seen over any four year period since they started recording that data by far.

Or the motives behind it, I should say.