As Democrats call for more restrictions on guns, some cities struggling with gun violence aren’t enforcing gun laws already on their books.
Many police departments are reporting high numbers of illegal firearms taken off the streets amid rising violence nationally.
However, in some of those cities, gun-related arrests, prosecutions, and convictions are down as liberal law enforcement policies contribute to the rise in crime.
DEMOCRATS REFRAME RISING CRIME AS GUN CONTROL ISSUE
Homicides rose 44% nationally between 2019 and last year, according to the Council on Criminal Justice.
Much of the problem stems from an increase in gun violence, though relatively few guns used in crimes have historically been purchased in the kinds of ways Congress wants to regulate with its latest gun control push.
A Justice Department study published in 2019 showed that only 7% of federal prisoners who were in possession of a firearm at the time of their crimes had purchased the gun from a licensed firearm dealer. Half of federal prisoners who’d carried guns during their offenses had either stolen their firearms or bought them on the black market.
In Washington, D.C., police took roughly 2,400 illegal guns off the streets in 2021, according to the Washington Post. But even as shootings and murders increased across the city, prosecutors declined in many cases to press charges.
During the last week of May, police in Washington recovered 77 illegal guns.
Officers appear to have recovered at least 25 of those without making any arrests, according to the police department.
And not everyone arrested for gun-related offenses will go on to face a conviction.
In Philadelphia in 2021, for example, police were arresting an average of nine people per day for illegal firearm possession by the spring. But gun convictions fell dramatically under the leadership of the city’s liberal district attorney, Larry Krasner, according to the Philly Inquirer.
“Put plainly, people accused of carrying illegal guns in recent years have had better than a coin flip’s chance of beating their case in court,” the paper reported.
Many shootings in cities that are struggling to contain rising crime go unsolved as police suffer under a combination of strained resources and increased demand.
Last year, through the month of August, police in Portland, Oregon, had filed gun violence charges in 285 cases. The city, however, had seen more than 840 shootings up to that point in the year, according to the Oregonian.
The problem persists at the federal level as well, as it has for years.
Last year, U.S. attorney’s offices around the country filed federal charges for a firearm offense against 15,525 defendants, according to the Justice Department. Just 9,971 were ultimately found guilty of a violation, meaning thousands of others arrested and charged with federal gun offenses walked free.
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At the local level, programs meant to address inequality can sometimes have the indirect consequence of worsening the chance of violence.
In King County, Washington, which is home to Seattle, local mayors objected almost immediately to a youth diversion program pushed last year by the county prosecutor’s office that allowed a community panel, not a criminal court, to decide how some first-time offenders should be treated.
One mayor complained in December 2021 that during the program’s first month, offenders responsible for bringing six guns into his town’s high schools were able to escape traditional punishment through the program.
In the first quarter of this year, King County had already recorded 384 reports of “shots fired,” according to county prosecutors. That was an increase from the number of shooting incidents reported in the first quarter of last year.
