The specter of a violent crime surrounds us. It’s not that they’re that common, all things considered, but that the perception that they are is with us everywhere.

But for some, the perception is irrelevant. They will experience such a horrible act of violence.

Maryland has gun control laws to prevent that. In Baltimore, it didn’t seem to help.

At least two people were killed and dozens were injured in a mass shooting at a block party in Baltimore early Sunday, officials said.

The two people who were killed at the party, in the Brooklyn Homes neighborhood, were identified by police Sunday as Aaliyah Gonzales, 18, and Kylis Fagbemi, 20.

Police said 28 others were injured, three of them critically. In a statement on Sunday, Baltimore police said those injured victims ranged in age from 13 to 32, with most being teenagers.

“Our hearts and prayers are going out to the families, sending out to the families and friends of these victims, as well as the community in our entire city,” acting Police Commissioner Richard Worley said at an earlier news conference.

Police first got calls about the shooting around 12:30 a.m. Sunday.

Nineteenpeople were taken to the emergency department of MedStar Harbor Hospital, all “suffering varying degrees of injury from gunshot wounds,” said Debra Schindler, MedStar Health’s regional director of media and public relations.

There have been no updates I could find on the critically injured, so I’m going to assume no news is good news here, especially since the death toll hasn’t increased.

Police are still trying to figure out a motive for the attack as well as still trying to locate the two suspected shooters, though they don’t rule out the possibility of there being more.

In other words, despite the number of people hurt and killed, this is nothing like a mass shooting as the DOJ defines them.

I’m also pretty sure that with this many people injured, most average people aren’t going to care about that definition.

Now, let’s understand that Maryland has tons of gun control laws. Baltimore is the city that perhaps most enthusiastically enforces those laws, for the most part. As this likely involved handguns, it should be noted that the state has a permit-to-purchase requirement and handgun registration. They also have universal background checks on handgun sales.

If it weren’t a handgun, well, that doesn’t help gun control’s case, I’m afraid. After all, there’s an assault weapon ban in place.

None of that seemed to prevent what happened in Baltimore.

Yet if we somehow focused on trying to prevent people from seeing violence quite so casually, both in Baltimore and elsewhere, we might not have these kinds of problems in the first place. That’s something a lot of people would benefit from, but Maryland has gone down the gun control path and accomplished nothing.

Now we’re looking at another horrific shooting that has scarred an entire neighborhood and numerous lives, all because nothing lawmakers in the state are doing is accomplishing anything of substance.

When the dust settles, though, we all know what will happen. There won’t be any recriminations for the proponents of gun control. They won’t say their policies failed or anything of the sort. Instead, they’ll simply call for more regulations and seek to infringe on the rights of responsible citizens throughout the state who did nothing wrong and we all know it.