District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Browser asked her Public Safety Team to find a solution to the city’s rising murder count on Thursday and as expected, it seems their solution will likely center around gun control.
The Daily Caller reported that so far this year 91 people have been murdered in D.C., nearly 30 percent higher than the total murders from last year.
Bowser and her team floated the idea of setting up new lighting and cameras in high crime neighborhoods and possibly a “legislative change” to the city’s gun laws, which are already some of the strictest in the nation.
A feature of the new gun plans is to increase penalties for crimes committed on public transit. That plan is in response to a high-profile murder where a man was stabbed on a city train.
No one seemed to question the mayor about why she would target gun owners in order to prevent future stabbings on city trains.
The mayor nor the police chief, Cathy Lanier, could come up with a definitive cause of the surge in violence. Lanier suggested that the “huge influx of guns” and high-capacity magazines into the city may have been a factor.
“Every city is seeing a flood of these high-capacity magazines,” Lanier told reporters.
Police are having a difficult time keeping up with the sheer number of murder cases. Detectives have closed less than 40 percent of murder cases so far this year.
By comparison, in 2011 and 2012 they closed 95 percent and 82 percent of cases, respectively.
