Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the homicide rate in Washington, D.C., in 2019 was higher than it was in 2018. There were 166 people killed in 2019, compared to 160 in 2018. In fact, the 2019 D.C. homicide rate is the highest number since 2008.

But isn’t that impossible? After all, our nation’s capital has one of the strictest gun-control laws in the United States.

The Post points out, “D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham has identified illegal firearms as a major factor fueling homicides.”

But how is that possible? Given that the city has such strict gun-control laws, how is it possible that people are still being killed by guns?

The answer is very simple. People who are willing to murder people don’t give a hoot about gun-control laws. Why should they? If they get caught, prosecuted, and convicted of murder, they are going to have to serve a very long jail term, maybe even life in prison. They know that. What difference does it make if a judge adds another 5 years for violating some gun-control law?

That’s what many in the gun-control crowd have never been able to process. They just naively assume that if possession of guns is made illegal, everyone will comply with the law.

In making that assumption, the gun-control crowd, of course, is right. Most people will comply with the law. They don’t want to take the chance of being convicted of a felony. The problem, however, is that those are the people who oftentimes are the victims of violent crime. Thus, what a gun-control law does is disarm those people, thereby preventing them from defending themselves against people who don’t give a hoot for gun-control laws.

The Post adds another dimension to the gun-control equation. It writes: “We also hope that Virginia — a major source of the illegal firearms that flood the District — reimposes a law to limit purchases of handguns to one a month.”

So, you see, it’s not enough to impose strict gun control in D.C. It then becomes necessary to impose strict gun control in Virginia. Once that is accomplished, however, the guns will begin flooding in from Maryland, which means even stricter gun control there. And let’s not forget the likelihood that smugglers from North Carolina, seeing the soaring prices of black-market guns in D.C., will begin flooding guns into D.C. by boats traveling up the Potomac. They’re going to need strict gun control in North Carolina too to ensure that gun control in D.C. works.

In other words, to order to make D.C. a gun-free society, which is what the gun-control crowd really wants to accomplish, a strict gun-control regime will ultimately be needed all across the country. That means disarming law-abiding people in every state, thereby preventing them from defending themselves against the violent people who don’t care whether they violate gun-control laws.

Let’s assume the gun-control crowd got its wish and that the only people who have guns are the Pentagon, the military establishment, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the TSA, the DEA, ICE, and other federal officials.

The question then arises: Who protects the citizenry from those people? What if a national “emergency” or “crisis” involving “national security” occurs and those federal people begin rounding up American families who officials think pose a threat to “national security” and placing them in Abu Ghraib prison camps all across the nation? At that point, many American citizens will wish they still had their guns.

But one thing is certain: Once people surrender their guns to the government, they will never make the mistake a second time because they simply will not have the opportunity to make the mistake a second time. That’s because once people give up their guns to their government, there is no possibility that the government will let them ever have their guns back.

The real problem in America is violence, not guns. Enacting a one-per-month purchase of a handgun in Virginia, as the Post recommends, is like putting a Band-Aid on a massive hemorrhaging wound.

There are two major ways to drastically reduce violence in America: (1) Legalize drugs, all of them. That would immediately put out of business all drug cartels and drug gangs. It would also drastically reduce the price of drugs, thereby reducing robberies, muggings, and thefts to get the money to pay the exorbitant black-market prices for drugs; and (2) Bring all the troops home from the Middle East and Afghanistan (and everywhere else), where they have been killing and injuring people and wreaking massive destructive violence on a constant level for decades. It is a virtual certainty that this culture of violence has seeped into American society, especially with what appear to be copycat killings that target people for what appears to be no rational reason.

Let’s legalize drugs and end the Pentagon-CIA culture of violence overseas. Violence would plummet here at home, which would thereby eliminate one of the principal excuses for gun control here in the United States.

The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental, God-given right, one that exists independently of the Second Amendment and the Constitution itself. It is also a key to a safer, more secure society.

Gun control leads to higher homicides and to the possibility of federal tyranny. Too bad people in Washington, D.C., haven’t figured that out.