Baltimore has an “assault weapons” ban, a “high capacity” magazine ban, a handgun purchaser fingerprint requirement, and a record rate of “killings per capita.”

The previous record was 55.35 homicides per 100,000 residents. The Baltimore Sun reports that 2017 set a new record rate of 55.8.

As of December 28, Baltimore had witnessed 343 homicides in 2017. That is slightly short of the record 344 witnessed in 2015, yet the homicide rate is higher this year because the city has fewer residents.

The highest number of homicides was 353, which was the total of deaths in 1995. But even then, the rate of “killings per capita” was lower because the city “had some 100,000 more residents.”

Ironically, the increased homicide rate comes just four years after the adoption of draconian gun controls via the Firearm Safety Act of 2013. That act banned “assault weapons” and “high capacity” magazines and required handgun purchasers to submit fingerprints to the Maryland State Police. According to The Trace, a gun control journalism outlet, the criminal use of “high capacity” magazines jumped in 2013 and continued to climb in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

In other words, stringent gun control has been a failure in Baltimore from the moment it was implemented, and now, the impotency of gun control shows itself in a record rate of “killings per capita.”

On July 12, 2017, Breitbart News reported that Baltimore’s murder rate was more than twice as high as the rate in Chicago. WJZ reported that murders were occurring so frequently in Baltimore that the number of murders in the city was higher than the number in Philadelphia, even though Philadelphia “[had] two and a half times the population.” Moreover, Baltimore was witnessing more murders than New York City, although NYC exceeds Baltimore in size nearly 14 times over.

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh (D) responded to the skyrocketing murder rate by pushing for more gun control.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.