The District of Columbia is a pretty gun controlled city. Sure, they may be a shall-issue jurisdiction when it comes to permits, but that was the result of a court decision they opted not to take to the Supreme Court. It was an artifact of their support for gun control. After all, they didn’t want to kill may issue laws in other places.

In fact, right now, local officials are doing everything they can to hamstring people trying to lawfully obtain firearms.

Despite all those gun control efforts in the city, though, it still didn’t seem to stop this from happening.

One person was killed and at least another 20, including an off-duty cop, were injured in a shooting shortly after midnight Sunday at a gathering with hundreds of people in Southeast D.C., according to police.

Police responded to the 3300 block of Dubois Place SE around 12:20 a.m., Chief Peter Newsham told reporters at the scene later Sunday morning.

A 17-year-old, Christopher Brown, died at the hospital, Newsham said. An off-duty 1st District police officer was seriously injured and was “struggling for her life,” he said.

Newsham did not believe the other injuries were life-threatening. He said police are looking for multiple shooters, noting that gunfire broke out from three different directions after a dispute.

The crime scene spanned several blocks and police found 172 bullets, according to the Washington Post.

However, it seems that this spot is a common gathering place.

Perhaps more tellingly, though, it’s a gathering place with a history that seems relevant.

Patricia Howard-Chittams is on 7B’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission and lives a half-mile away from where the shootings took place. “I’m honestly just floored,” Howard-Chittams tells DCist.

However, she says this is nothing new. She’s complained about large gatherings of this nature for years, which has resulted in threats and having her tires slashed — it happened this morning, too, Howard-Chittams says.

So these aren’t good, clean-cut, all-American kids just hanging out and not causing trouble. At least some of these are little hoodlums who aren’t above destroying private property to try and intimidate people who don’t approve of what they’re doing.

And now it’s on the police to do something. That’s something Howard-Chittams doesn’t think will happen.

However, in the present climate, she believes that there’s very little the police can do about it.

“The politicians are not supporting them. Our mayor is not supporting them,” says Howard-Chittams. “If [the police] are aggressive with how they treat the small stuff, they are accused of over-policing… their hands are tied.”

She’s not wrong.

The truth is, there’s reason to believe that hitting folks over the small stuff actually reduces the chances of big stuff happening, big stuff like this. What didn’t reduce the likelihood of this happening, however, is gun control.

The District of Columbia has plenty of it, and yet multiple shooters were able to get guns and open fire on a crowd in our nation’s capital. One person is dead, at least 20 others wounded.

If gun control works like anti-gunners claim, this shouldn’t have happened, but it did.

Kind of like how pro-Second Amendment folks have been saying it would all along.