Washington DC Is Well on Its Way to Regaining Its Title of America’s Murder Capital by Posting a Decade Record Breaking Number of Murders in 2019!

On New Year’s Day, 1 January 2020, the Washington Post published, as they do every New Year’s Day, the homicide statistics for Washington, DC and the surrounding adjacent Maryland and Virginia suburbs.  Using the WaPo data and the Census Bureau 2019 population numbers, I have calculated the homicide rates of DC and the adjacent Maryland and Virginia suburbs.  This table displays the results:

The stats once again clearly demonstrated that any WaPo reader so naïve as to believes the myth that onerous gun laws yield safer communities need to look no further than these WaPo stats to be disabused of that fantasy. The FACT is a DC resident, where firearms are virtually impossible to own, is over 17.5 times more likely to be a homicide victim then one of us Gun Tottin Virginians who are fortunate enough to live in a state where gun ownership for self protection is almost unrestricted.  Even a Marylander, with very restrictive gun laws, is over five times less likely to be a homicide victim than a DC resident; much better than DC but a Marylander is still over 3.4 times more likely to be a homicide victim than one of us Virginia Gun Totters!

This article clearly shows the breathtaking disparity in homicide rates between the Virginia adjacent suburbs and the DC or Maryland jurisdictions that not only don’t have the death penalty but where criminals have little chance of being confronted by a law abiding citizen who just might just have a gun of their own.  Virginia is where gun ownership is almost unrestricted and the only question for murders is “do you prefer the needle or the chair?” Another recent WaPo article noted that 60% of DC homicide offenders had a previous gun arrest.

Contributing to the DC problem is the DC model for “punishing” criminals as embodied in the DC Youth Rehabilitation Act which routinely puts youthful murderers back on the street in record time.  Now the DC Council wants to “fix” the act to treat street thugs up to age 25 instead of the present 22 as “misunderstood” kids that didn’t really mean to commit murder with a firearm so they should be released on their own recognizance until they have killed at least three people. Then, in the unlikely event they are ever prosecuted they should be “rehabilitated” for a couple of years in a group home and then released back into the general population to put into practice what they learned in “rehab.”

DC officials must not care much about a bunch of street thugs killing each other but what’s intolerable is they should care about the number of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. This is obviously a marksmanship training problem so they should amend the law so iInstead of the present DC “catch and release” policy for perpetrators of gun violence, they should be required to complete a shooting course to improve their aim during “rehab” so they only hit the other thugs they are aiming at.

In conclusion, the statistics clearly demonstrate that contrary to liberal rhetoric, it is an “inconvenient truth” that “guns actually do make us safer.” Ask any citizen who has been directed to “shelter in place” because a crazed killer was loose in their neighborhood how they feel about owning a gun and I’ll bet the overwhelming majority wished they had a gun. Could it be that homicidal maniacs would much rather commit their crimes in jurisdictions like DC and MD without the death penalty and are not so anxious to attack law-abiding VA citizens as they might be "packing heat?"