Another constant: About half of those killed this way are black men, though they make up just 6 percent of the U.S. population. In 2001, when George W. Bush took office, 5,279 black men were murdered with firearms, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2012, it was 5,947.

These deaths are concentrated in poor, segregated neighborhoods that have little political clout.

“I think that people in those communities are perceived as not sufficiently important because they don’t vote, they don’t have economic power,” said Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney who has spent much of his career focused on urban violence. “I think there’s some racism involved. I don’t think we care about African-American lives as much as we care about white lives.”

The few congressional efforts to advance gun legislation in recent years have been prompted by mass shootings, violence that is seemingly random and thus where everyone can feel at risk.

“Congress has only moved in response to galvanizing tragedy, and galvanizing tragedy tends to not involve urban, run-of-the-mill murder,” said Matt Bennett, a gun policy expert at Third Way, a centrist think-tank. “The narrative about the need for gun violence prevention generally is driven by these black swan events, and those often involve white people,” he added. “It is horrific and tragic, but that’s the fact.”

When Adam Lanza shot his way into the Sandy Hook Elementary School with a military-style rifle and handguns in December 2012, it wasn’t clear if any laws would have stopped him. Lanza had taken the guns from his mother, who had purchased them legally.

The package of proposed legislation and policy initiatives recommended by the Obama administration in the aftermath of Sandy Hook centered on closing loopholes in background checks and renewing the federal ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004. The president also called for increased spending on mental health, crackdowns on the trafficking networks that sell illegal guns, and more than $150 million for a new program to put more cops and psychologists in schools.

Obama and gun control advocates made universal background checks the focus of their push. It wasn’t a policy that was relevant to Newtown, but they saw it as the most likely way to reduce everyday gun violence and save lives. Most researchers agree that a better background check system could help curtail both urban gun violence and mass shootings, though there’s no hard data to indicate how much.

“We bury hundreds of kids every year in the inner city,” Gross recalled them telling the administration representative. “Some of the solutions need to apply to us.”

There was less evidence proving that the other elements of the president’s plan would reduce gun violence. Though the public quickly focused on one weapon Lanza used, a Bushmaster XM15-E2S, experts knew the assault weapons ban hadn’t saved many lives. The effects of a renewed ban “are likely be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement,” a report funded by the Justice Department concluded.

A former senior White House official agreed. While a ban on high capacity magazines could help some, the official told ProPublica, the assault weapons ban “does nothing.” Though Obama endorsed it as part of the post-Newtown package, “we did the bare minimum,” the official said. “We would have pushed a lot harder if we had believed in it.”

Some gun control advocates who worked with the administration on gun legislation said they saw the endorsement of the assault weapons ban as a bargaining chip. “It’s all a dance, it’s a kabuki thing, and right from the beginning the White House understood that they weren’t going to get a ban done,” said Bennett, the gun policy expert. “They had to talk about it. It would have been insane not to. Every news report after Sandy Hook had this horrible looking AR-15, and noted that it had been a banned weapon that now wasn’t.”

Adding police at schools has popular appeal, but classroom homicides are exceedingly rare.

“Any given school can expect to experience a student homicide about once every 6,000 years,” said Dewey Cornell, a University of Virginia professor who studies who studies school safety. “Children are in far more danger outside of schools than in schools. If we had to take officers out of the community to put them in schools, then actually children will be less safe rather than more safe.”

Two former administration staffers who worked on the gun violence platform said the $150 million proposal for cops and counselors in schools—which “may have been a bit outsized,” one said—was driven by Vice President Biden’s history of championing federal grants for hiring cops.

It also seemed like “something that people might be willing to, you know, give us money for,” a former senior White House official said.

The staffers said they could not remember why funding to support strategies like Ceasefire was not included in the plan. “Look, if it was some deliberate conversation not to do it, I would remember,” the former senior official said.

Though Justice Department grants for community violence prevention weren’t part of the post-Sandy Hook platform, a staffer said “we were watching the fiscal year 2014 budget process and making sure we were continuing to push for those resources at DOJ.” Bruce Reed, Biden’s chief of staff at the time, said budget concerns likely kept funding for innovative local efforts out of the package.

“We didn’t want to turn this into an appropriations bill, because that would be … ” he said, shrugging. “That would cost us whatever Republicans we had hoped for.”

“The appropriations climate was, if possible, more divisive than the gun debate,” Reed added later. “We were always between shutdowns.”

Webster, the Johns Hopkins gun violence researcher, said that it would have been “more justifiable” to devote federal dollars to supporting Ceasefire and similar programs than it was to put the money toward school security. “I don’t know of any evidence that putting police in schools makes them safe, and I do know of evidence that having police in schools leads to more kids being arrested,” he said.

Two weeks after Obama unveiled his plan, McBride and dozens of other clergy members, many of them from cities struggling with high rates of gun violence, met again with staffers from Vice President Biden’s task force.

The mood at the January 29 meeting was tense. Many of the attendees, including McBride, felt the president’s agenda had left out black Americans.

“The policy people working for Biden worked with the reality of Congress,” said Teny Gross, one of the original Boston Miracle outreach workers who now leads the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago. “What they were proposing to us was very limited and was not going to help the inner city.”

Gross said he “blew a gasket.” The clergy members in the room were pleading for help. “We bury hundreds of kids every year in the inner city,” Gross recalled them telling the administration representative. “Some of the solutions need to apply to us.”

A staffer said that the political will of the country was not focused on urban violence, several ministers who attended the meeting recalled.

“What was said to us by the White House was, there’s really no support nationally to address the issue of urban violence,” said Reverend Charles Harrison, a pastor from Indianapolis. “The support was to address the issue of gun violence that affected suburban areas—schools where white kids were killed.”

The Reverend Jeff Brown, from Boston, was angered by the administration’s calculated approach. “When you say something like that and you represent the president of the United States, and the first African-American president of the United States, you know, that’s hugely disappointing,” he said.

Former administration officials said they thought it was tragic that the everyday killings of black children did not get more political attention. “I totally agree with their frustrations,” a former official said. “At the same time, when the nation listens, you’ve got to speak, and you don’t get to pick when the nation listens.”

It would turn out there was little political will to realize the administration’s gun-violence proposals either. Measures to expand background checks and ban assault weapons died on April 17, 2013, when they couldn’t muster the votes necessary to advance in the Senate.

In his 2014 budget recommendations around the same time, Obama again asked for more money for local grant programs to combat urban gun violence. He recommended tripling the funding for a Justice Department grant that helped cities adopt Ceasefire from $8 million to $25 million. Overall, he requested $79 million for grants to support similar initiatives. Obama had asked for almost twice that much to put more cops and psychologists in schools.

Congress slashed Obama’s requests across the board. Instead of approving $150 million to help schools hire cops and psychologists, it created a $75 million school safety research program.

It also rejected his proposed increases for Ceasefire and similar programs. Instead, Congress took many of the small grants and made them even smaller. One program was cut from $8 million to $5.5 million. Another shrank from $2 million to $1 million.

In all, Congress spent $31 million on five urban violence-related grants—less than half of what it approved for research on how to make schools safer.

There have been increasing concerns about rising murder rates over the past year in cities across the country. Some have blamed the increases on the “Ferguson Effect”—the theory that increased scrutiny of cops has made them reluctant to do their jobs—although there is “no data” to support this claim, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said recently. It’s not clear how much murders have increased nationwide. Each city has its own trend. Some have seen an uptick only in comparison to the historic lows they had last year. In other cities, violence is truly spiking. Baltimore recently recorded its 300th homicide this year, the most since 1999.

In Indianapolis, where homicides are set to increase for the third straight year, more federal funding might have made a difference. In early 2012, Indianapolis applied for a Justice Department grant to help implement Ceasefire, requesting $1.5 million over three years. But just four of more than roughly 60 cities that applied received funding. Indianapolis was not among them.

“Absolutely, there’s no doubt in my mind, if we had been awarded the grant we would have had the financial carryover to move the program forward,” said Shoshanna Spector, the executive director of IndyCAN, a local faith-based advocacy group that pushed for Ceasefire.

Douglas Hairston, who works on private-public partnerships at the Indianapolis mayor’s office, said the city is currently doing “60 to 70 percent” of the Ceasefire strategy.

“Federal funds would have helped,” he said. “We know that we could do more, and we’re striving to find ways to do it.”

Earlier this year, Indianapolis Police Chief Rick Hite said the city was doing the strategy “with modifications” and that the city is always using the “tenets of Ceasefire.”

There have been 133 murders so far this year in Indianapolis, according to police department data, up from 97 in 2012.

In Baltimore, Ceasefire appears to have struggled. The program’s manager resigned in March, the Baltimore Sun reported. Webster, the researcher evaluating the effort, told the paper he questioned whether the rollout of Ceasefire in the Western District was “being done on the cheap and being done in a way that is not even resembling the program model.”

Other cities have seen more success. New Orleans and Kansas City both saw drops in violence that researchers have credited to their new Ceasefire programs. Chicago has been rolling out call-ins to an increasing number of police districts. Gary, Indiana, and Birmingham, Alabama, both launched new Ceasefire programs this year. Cities have often paid for the programs using money from a variety of sources: federal dollars, local governments, and, increasingly, local foundations.

Obama has launched an initiative to support young men and boys of color. One of its stated goals of My Brother’s Keeper, which kicked off last year, is reducing violence. The initiative is backed by more than $500 million in corporate and philanthropic commitments. But most of that money has been devoted to mentoring and education programs.

Organizers said they would reduce violence, too, albeit indirectly. “I would challenge this notion that violence reduction resources or targeting is only to be looked at through the lens of reducing violence per se,” Broderick Johnson, the chair of the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force, told ProPublica. “It is just as important to look at it in terms of opportunities for young people to stay in school or get jobs or to get second chances.”

Last year, the Justice Department also launched a modest effort called the Violence Reduction Network, which provides cities with training and advice from former police chiefs and other crime-fighting experts. Many of the needs the network meets are basic: It helped Wilmington, Delaware, police create a homicide unit. Wilmington, with 70,000 mostly black residents, has a higher murder rate than Chicago.

Running the network is inexpensive. It costs about $250,000 per city annually. But once again, it’s not meeting the greater need. The program is targeted at the roughly four dozen cities with highest violent crime rates in the nation. The government is only working with 10 of them.

The White House did not comment on questions about the administration’s overall response to urban violence. The Justice Department offered the following statement: “In addition to focusing on violent crime reduction in cities, the department also responded to one of the worst mass shootings in our nation’s history in Newtown by identifying funding for school resource officers to help keep kids safe in schools and to assist the many victims of this heinous crime.” (See the full statement)

Biden’s office also offered a statement: “Whether it’s by banning assault weapons, incentivizing local police to create better relationships with residents of America’s cities, or finding alternatives to jail, including diversionary programs like drug courts, the vice president has worked to support any viable solutions to reduce gun violence in our cities.”

When Jeff Brown was at the White House recently for an initiative on extremism, he ran into Biden.

“The vice president walked up to me and said, ‘Reverend Brown, good to see you,’” Brown said. Biden said he remembered meeting Brown back in the ‘90s, when he visited Boston to hear more about Operation Ceasefire and the Boston Miracle.

“I hope we can bring back some of what we did in Boston,” Brown said he told the vice president.

“I hope so, too,” Biden replied.

Brown laughed at the memory. “You’re the vice president—can’t you do something about it?”