i think it's fair to say as a proxy for a person's threat that they presented with a firearm the two classes of prior convictions that the guidelines used to increase the base offense level  crimes of violence and controlled pounces the use of controlled substance offense has been criticised by at least one court in the circuit and by the sentencing commission because controlled substance offenses are not all necessarily violent and all controlled substance offenses really are not created equally so in some cases according to the court or specifically said that i recognize that you have a limited history of violence if it's even conceded and i'm not even considering whether you do or not to tell you the truth so i think that statement no evidence of possessing the gun in this case in connection with drug dealing there were no drugs found in research ron has when he was arrested and he has no prior history of using a gun in connection so it was an assumption the court made based on that could apply to really any person any defendant who is charged with possessing a firearm and who has prior convictions for controlled substance offenses and considered his request for a variance and those statistics did not really concern whether those dependents received a variance so they really are not relevant to the issue of whether a variance was appropriate in this case and whether it was adequately considered by the court and since the government did open the door to discussing statistics we believe it is worth noting that one rd of all cases twenty eight  judge's rationale that wasn't why we cited to six i think when a defendant makes the argument that i am different that this is unique because i'm not violent because i don't i'm not a major drug trafficker implicit in that argument as he is different than the people that are sentenced at a base that's level twenty four and when you have eighteen thousand six hundred defendants since two thousand and more than just saying i'm a lower drug offender i don't have a history of violence the more needs to be showing how he's different from others have a basic sense level of twenty four based on prior volatile mixture of guns and drugs and what i find interesting about his argument is that that truism expressed by the district court is the same for anything that has a prior conviction for drug trafficking and that may be true except that this defendant continued in drug trafficking after his release but more importantly to fault the court for using an argument for using reasoning that applies to many  when he offered no argument to show himself unique among them is not a procedure where the court considered the three thousand five hundred and fifty three a factors in doing so knowledge he was requesting acknowledge that yes you don't have a violent history acknowledge that yes i understand that your drug trafficking crimes are not higher level drug trafficking crimes but still i believe  some discussion of the policy behind the guidelines and if you're going to critique why a guideline in a particular case should not be applied i think there has to be some kind of critique of the policy underlying the gu partially a policy challenge sure guidelines but then how in this case and has applied to this kind and the policy underlying the guidelines is not appropriate and result in the sense greater than necessary