Residents of East Mt. Airy have reason to be concerned. A group pf 250 concerned neighbors packed Grace Epiphany Church to hear Captain Nicholas Smith of the 14th Police District and 8th District Councilperson Cindy Bass address the issue. In recent weeks, four people have been shot and two killed in the neighborhood.

Smith told those in attendance that homicides in the 14th District have increased by 200%, a remarkable outbreak of violence for a district in which homicide rates are up 5% overall, according to numbers kept by the Philadelphia Police Department.

Philadelphia isn’t the only big city experiencing rising gun violence. Washington, D.C., has seen homicides surge, while homicide rates in Baltimore and Chicago have finally fallen after surges several years ago. For people in East Mt. Airy and in the rest of the city, gun violence is a relentless threat to our well-being. So far this year, 202 people have been killed. Not all were killed by guns, but most were.

While the country’s gun debate has focused on the increasing rates of mass shootings, like those in El Paso and Dayton earlier this month, mass killings count for a tiny percentage of the more than 30,000 gun deaths in this country every year. (In fact, that number jumped to almost 40,000 in 2018). Of the roughly 14,000 gun homicides (the rest, approximately two thirds, are suicides), a vast majority of the people killed by guns are killed in American cities.

Statistics gathered by Everytown for Gun Safety*, a non-partisan, nonprofit organization that tracks gun violence, show stark realities about the nature of gun violence in the U.S. A study the group conducted in 2015 showed that nearly half of all gun homicides in the U.S. took place in 127 cities that contain less than 25% of the nation’s population.

Also, according to Everytown, an average of 7,500 African Americans are killed by guns, a rate 10 times higher than that of white Americans. Most of those victims are between 15 and 29 years old. In the cities with the 50 highest murder rates, African Americans accounted for 81 percent of the victims despite being 38 percent of the population.

While Americans continue to debate the means of controlling guns in a way that helps make our schools, churches, festivals and Walmarts safer, we can’t overlook the bedrock of American gun violence that we’ve let rage in our urban centers for decades.

I think the good news is that a bulk of the gun legislation currently on the table is just as likely to curb urban gun violence as it is to stop the next mass shooter. A simple fact about gun control is that states and cities with the strongest gun control policies have the safest streets. New York City, where nearly every gun must be registered, has one of the lowest crime rates in the country, making it a safer city than Portland, Oregon, and Madison, Wisconsin.

Arguments for improved gun control are many. It’s time, in the words of protestors at a recent vigil for victims of the Dayton, Ohio, shootings to “do something.”

Pete Mazzaccaro

*The original version of this column mistakenly referred to the nonprofit organization as "Every Town USA."