Despite an increase in arrests—nearly twice as many were recorded from July 15-31 as from May 15-31—crime continues to run rampant in Baltimore. On Wednesday, in a vacant Penn-North-area house, police found the body of the 211th homicide victim. That’s as many homicides as Baltimore saw in all of 2014, and the highest homicide count reached by this point in the year since the 1990s.
At City Hall on Wednesday, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake lauded recent police efforts and implored residents to work with authorities to bring perpetrators to justice. Not a bad start: But then, predictably, she called for a “national response,” claiming similar upticks in violence in a few other cities indicated that the “state-by-state approach” to gun laws “has not been effective,” and blaming other states’ “lax” gun laws for Baltimore’s ongoing violence.
If that’s the case, Ms. Rawlings-Blake, why aren’t cities in those states seeing a corresponding jump in crime?
