Washington, DC is the our nation’s capital. It’s where so many great men and women have walked and worked over the years, shaping this nation to be what it is today, the last remaining superpower.
The area around Capitol Hill feels different, like you’re walking among the ancient Greek or Roman temples and monuments. That’s deliberate, as is evidenced by the architecture of so many of the government buildings.
But if you got a little ways away, Washington, DC changes. It’s a city of disparity, where the powerful live just a few miles away from those who scoff at every law those powerful pass.
In 2023, many communities report a drop in the number of murders. That suggests we’ll see a drop in the overall rate of murders.
In Washington, DC, though, they saw no such thing.
Washington, DC, recorded in 2023 the highest annual number of homicides the city has witnessed since 1997 despite stringent gun control.
According to the Washington Post, 274 people were killed in the city in 2023.
D.C. saw a murder rate of 40 per 100,000 residents, making it “deadlier than 55 of the country’s 60 most populous cities, behind only New Orleans, Cleveland, Baltimore and Memphis.”
…
The Post noted that D.C.’s surging homicides got the attention of the United States Congress and other federal officials who “questioned whether D.C. leaders were equipped to prevent the District from regressing to the social dysfunction and near municipal collapse of the late 20th century, when the city, overwhelmed by crack-fueled bloodshed, became known as America’s murder capital.”
Breitbart’s AWR Hawkins notes that all of the cities with a worse problem than DC are all run by Democrats, which is fair.
Yet I’m going to point out something else.
Both Baltimore and Washington are both cities that can get gun control passed while Cleveland, New Orleans, and Memphis are in pro-gun states.
To hear anti-gunners tell it, those three cities are such a problem because of a lack of gun control, but that’s not the issue in Baltimore or DC.
Maybe the issue isn’t the availability of guns.
I know, I know, that’s crazy talk.
However, it’s pretty clear that DC’s efforts aren’t really working, and yeah, they have significant gun control on the books. Just because they became a shall-issue jurisdiction prior to Bruen doesn’t change anything.
In fact, it’s so significant that Giffords thinks they’re doing almost everything right, only taking issue with there being no mental health record reporting requirement.
From assault weapon and magazine bans to red flag laws to gun registration, our nation’s capital has every bit of gun control anti-gunners are currently asking for, and yet at a time when homicides are dropping all over the nation, Washington’s is increasing.
Fascinating, isn’t it?
The truth of the matter is that gun control cannot and will not cause the homicide rate to drop because the people carrying out most of the murders in the city aren’t exactly law-abiding citizens otherwise. They’re usually involved in other criminal activity and this is just an extension of that.
Anti-gunners routinely act like the issues with so-called gun violence–and not all of these murders are firearm-related–is that law-abiding citizens can get guns without jumping through a million hoops.
But DC has almost every hoop they’re currently asking for.
We see how that’s worked out, too, and Baltimore isn’t much better.
At the end of the day, if we really want to address the problem, we’d stop pretending guns are the issue and recognize that what really is a problem are that some people think murder is a way to solve differences with others.
Figure the odds of that happening, though. They’re not good.
