Correction: An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly reported the number of homicides in the District in 1991.The correct number is 489, according to the Metropolitan Police Department, or 482, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics. This version has been updated.

AMONG THE rituals that mark the end of the year, none is grimmer than the annual tally of homicides across the country. Even when the toll decreases year over year, as it did in the District in 2016, the loss of life is hard to bear: An actress and yoga teacher killed on her way to Christmas dinner. A 17-year-old girl fatally stabbed in a squabble over a cellphone. A Democratic National Committee staffer, age 27, shot during an apparent robbery. That so much of the violence is so senseless underscores the difficulties facing police and society at large.

Nowhere were the challenges starker than in Chicago, where the rates of murders and shootings skyrocketed. Seven hundred sixty-two people were victims of homicide in 2016, a 57 percent increase over 2015, the most since 1997, more murders than Los Angeles and New York City combined. There were more than 3,500 shootings. Behind the numbers are heartbreaking stories of children killed in crossfire and young men living lives of hopelessness that ended in bloodshed.

In the nation’s 30 largest cities, the 2016 murder rate was 14 percent higher than in the previous year, according to year-end projections by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. (Chicago accounts for more than 40 percent of the increase.) Experts variously blame poverty, gang warfare, availability of guns and a demoralized police force. It is important to remember, as the Brennan Center experts point out, that crime rates across the country remain near all-time lows, significantly below what the country experienced in the 1990s. Chicago, for example, had at least 800 homicide victims each year between 1990 and 1995. In New York City, there were 2,262 murders in 1990, compared with 334 in 2016. The District’s many homicides (489 according to the Metropolitan Police Department, 482 according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics) in 1991 made it the “murder capital” of the United States; in 2016, there were 135, down from an alarming spike in 2015, even as the city’s population grows.

Interim D.C. police chief Peter Newsham attributed part of the city’s success in bringing down this year’s numbers to a concerted effort to target illegal guns. New York officials say that enacting stricter penalties for repeat gun violence offenders — something Chicago police are pushing for — has helped. When police chiefs gathered in Washington in 2015 to discuss how to deal with the violence, they noted that more and more they were seeing shooting scenes with multiple firearms and an increased number of shell casings. They recommended harsher sentences for gun crimes and for the use of high-capacity magazines.

The proliferation of weapons of war on the streets of American cities should be addressed. So too should the underlying social and economic issues that, as a Chicago clergyman told the New York Times, result in “desperation, decadence, depression and rage.” No family should have to lose a loved one to violence.