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Record Levels of Gun Violence and the Democrats’ Dilemma

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Just weeks after taking office as Mayor of New York, Eric Adams faces a political and public-policy challenge that is vexing Democratic mayors across the country—and President Joe Biden. Gun violence in the United States is at record levels, and Democrats are under intense pressure to bring down violent crime while also curbing police abuse. More than two-thirds of the country’s largest cities, including the three largest—New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—experienced an increase in homicides in 2021, a continuation of a surge in violence that some officials had hoped would fade as COVID-19 lockdowns eased. Instead, homicides have also risen in smaller cities, such as Albuquerque, Austin, Columbus, Louisville, Nashville, Rochester, and Tucson.

All told, more than twenty thousand people were killed by gun violence in 2021—an increase from the record number set in 2020, when homicides spiked by roughly thirty per cent from the previous year, the largest single-year jump since the F.B.I. began publishing the numbers in the nineteen-sixties. As has been true for decades, the vast majority of those killed were young men of color living in low-income communities, but Americans are also dying in confrontations over parking spaces, or because of something they wrote on social media. Bystanders, many of them children, are being killed or injured in rising numbers, too. Gunshot admissions in pediatric hospitals rose in multiple cities, with a three-hundred-per-cent increase in Hartford, Connecticut, and a fifty-per-cent rise in Houston. Police officers are perishing as well, with sixty-one officers killed by firearms in 2021, a thirty-six-per-cent increase from 2020. (The No. 1 killer of law-enforcement officials last year was COVID, which killed three hundred and one officers, a sixty-five-per-cent increase from 2020.) The pandemic also limited trials, with jurors often unable to meet. And gun purchases surged—today, an estimated eighty million Americans own guns.

During Mayor Adams’s first month on the job, a man with a history of mental-health issues pushed Michelle Go, a forty-year-old woman, in front of a subway train in a Times Square subway station, killing her; an eleven-month-old baby was hit in the cheek by a stray bullet while sitting in a parked car with her mother in the Bronx; and Kristal Bayron-Nieves, a nineteen-year-old cashier at a Burger King, was shot dead as she struggled to open her register during a botched robbery in East Harlem. Police officers were wounded in separate incidents in the Bronx and on Staten Island. But it was a seemingly routine call for a domestic disturbance in Harlem on Friday evening that presented the greatest challenge so far to Adams in his brief tenure. Jason Rivera, a twenty-two-year-old police officer, and Wilbert Mora, a twenty-seven-year-old officer, were fatally wounded by a man wielding a Glock pistol with a high-capacity magazine. The gun had been stolen from its owner in Baltimore, in 2017. The gunman, who was shot by a third officer, died of his wounds. “It is our city against the killers,” Adams, who is also a retired police captain, said during a press conference at the scene of the shooting. “This was just not an attack on three brave officers. This was an attack on the city of New York.”

On Monday, Adams, a centrist Democrat who campaigned on a promise to reduce crime, unveiled a “Blueprint to End Gun Violence” that includes the revamping of anti-crime police units that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Administration had disbanded in 2020, after weeks of protests against police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis. Progressives immediately criticized Adams for bringing back the units, which had been criticized for employing heavy-handed tactics in communities of color, predicting that the move would increase tensions between those communities and the police. Adams also called for changes in state laws surrounding bail for defendants who are considered dangerous and the minimum age that someone can be charged as an adult.

Adams, in a local television interview on Tuesday, dismissed the criticisms from progressives and said that he had promised voters that he would crack down on illegal guns. “The people of this city elected me mayor,” he said. “What I believe has happened in this city and country is that the social media savvy, the loudest, that body, has really hijacked the narrative. People want to be safe and they don’t believe people who carry guns should be returned to our streets.”

Democratic mayors across the country—and the Biden Administration—are also announcing new strategies. Last year, President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland launched a Justice Department initiative to reduce violent crimes by slowing the spread of illegal guns. The department has created five regional strike forces to target gun-trafficking corridors, required U.S. Attorney’s offices to update and enhance joint strategies with local law enforcement tailored to specific regions, and provided roughly seven hundred and fifty million dollars in grants to reduce violent crime. Hours before the killing of the young police officer in New York, in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Garland announced that the Biden Administration is requesting a billion dollars from Congress in additional community-policing grants. “While many of the public-safety challenges our cities face require a unique and tailored approach, gun violence is a universal challenge and one that demands comprehensive action,” Garland said.

The trafficking of firearms up Interstate 95 from Southern states with laxer gun-control laws to New York and other large Northeastern cities where they are sold at a profit has become so common that law-enforcement officials refer to the highway as the “Iron Pipeline.” Biden and Garland also announced a crackdown on “ghost guns”—difficult-to-trace firearms that are often bought online and shipped in parts that can be assembled after delivery. They proposed a rule change that would eliminate loopholes in federal regulations that allow certain firearm parts to be manufactured without serial numbers because they are not, legally, firearms until they are assembled. Anyone legally barred from buying firearms can order ghost-gun kits online because a background check is not required for purchase. In December, a tech-savvy thirteen-year-old boy in Georgia, who ordered ghost-gun kits and then assembled the weapons at home and sold them, accidentally shot and killed his fourteen-year-old sister.

Republican elected officials describe the country as lawless under Biden and big-city Democratic mayors—and mostly scoff at such measures. Efforts to “defund” police departments have largely stalled, but conservatives continue to highlight the issue as evidence that Democrats are soft on crime. Some far-right-backed lawmakers in Republican-controlled states are going further, refusing to participate in federal efforts to track illegal guns used in crimes. Last year, the Republican-controlled state legislature in Missouri passed a law prohibiting local law-enforcement officials from participating in federal programs that did so. The law was part of a “Second Amendment sanctuary” movement led by conservative activists who, according to the Times, demand that Republican-controlled state governments act more aggressively by defying the Democratic-controlled federal government on culture-war issues, such as abortion, voting, and gun rights.

Lisa Monaco, the Deputy Attorney General, said that the department filed a statement of interest supporting a lawsuit filed by the city of St. Louis challenging the constitutionality of the Missouri law, which has resulted in at least a dozen officers around the state declining to participate in federal gun-tracing programs. “Our focus, my focus is: What’s the impact on our ability to actually do the enforcement job, to do the job of protecting communities?” Monaco told me. “We’ve seen a retreat from participation on our task forces, things like the A.T.F. task forces, and providing information, providing guns for us to trace.” Monaco said that the Biden Administration’s approach is centered on identifying the gun traffickers and repeat offenders who are the main sources of gun violence and working closely with community members and local law enforcement. Asked about prioritizing high arrest numbers, a strategy touted by some Republicans, Monaco declined to comment on the efforts and approaches of previous Administrations. “What we’re focussed on is addressing the most significant drivers of violent crime,” she said. “The repeat offenders, the gun trafficking, and the gun violence and doing it with communities.”


Just weeks after taking office as Mayor of New York, Eric Adams faces a political and public-policy challenge that is vexing Democratic mayors across the country—and President Joe Biden. Gun violence in the United States is at record levels, and Democrats are under intense pressure to bring down violent crime while also curbing police abuse. More than two-thirds of the country’s largest cities, including the three largest—New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—experienced an increase in homicides in 2021, a continuation of a surge in violence that some officials had hoped would fade as COVID-19 lockdowns eased. Instead, homicides have also risen in smaller cities, such as Albuquerque, Austin, Columbus, Louisville, Nashville, Rochester, and Tucson.

All told, more than twenty thousand people were killed by gun violence in 2021—an increase from the record number set in 2020, when homicides spiked by roughly thirty per cent from the previous year, the largest single-year jump since the F.B.I. began publishing the numbers in the nineteen-sixties. As has been true for decades, the vast majority of those killed were young men of color living in low-income communities, but Americans are also dying in confrontations over parking spaces, or because of something they wrote on social media. Bystanders, many of them children, are being killed or injured in rising numbers, too. Gunshot admissions in pediatric hospitals rose in multiple cities, with a three-hundred-per-cent increase in Hartford, Connecticut, and a fifty-per-cent rise in Houston. Police officers are perishing as well, with sixty-one officers killed by firearms in 2021, a thirty-six-per-cent increase from 2020. (The No. 1 killer of law-enforcement officials last year was COVID, which killed three hundred and one officers, a sixty-five-per-cent increase from 2020.) The pandemic also limited trials, with jurors often unable to meet. And gun purchases surged—today, an estimated eighty million Americans own guns.

During Mayor Adams’s first month on the job, a man with a history of mental-health issues pushed Michelle Go, a forty-year-old woman, in front of a subway train in a Times Square subway station, killing her; an eleven-month-old baby was hit in the cheek by a stray bullet while sitting in a parked car with her mother in the Bronx; and Kristal Bayron-Nieves, a nineteen-year-old cashier at a Burger King, was shot dead as she struggled to open her register during a botched robbery in East Harlem. Police officers were wounded in separate incidents in the Bronx and on Staten Island. But it was a seemingly routine call for a domestic disturbance in Harlem on Friday evening that presented the greatest challenge so far to Adams in his brief tenure. Jason Rivera, a twenty-two-year-old police officer, and Wilbert Mora, a twenty-seven-year-old officer, were fatally wounded by a man wielding a Glock pistol with a high-capacity magazine. The gun had been stolen from its owner in Baltimore, in 2017. The gunman, who was shot by a third officer, died of his wounds. “It is our city against the killers,” Adams, who is also a retired police captain, said during a press conference at the scene of the shooting. “This was just not an attack on three brave officers. This was an attack on the city of New York.”

On Monday, Adams, a centrist Democrat who campaigned on a promise to reduce crime, unveiled a “Blueprint to End Gun Violence” that includes the revamping of anti-crime police units that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Administration had disbanded in 2020, after weeks of protests against police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis. Progressives immediately criticized Adams for bringing back the units, which had been criticized for employing heavy-handed tactics in communities of color, predicting that the move would increase tensions between those communities and the police. Adams also called for changes in state laws surrounding bail for defendants who are considered dangerous and the minimum age that someone can be charged as an adult.

Adams, in a local television interview on Tuesday, dismissed the criticisms from progressives and said that he had promised voters that he would crack down on illegal guns. “The people of this city elected me mayor,” he said. “What I believe has happened in this city and country is that the social media savvy, the loudest, that body, has really hijacked the narrative. People want to be safe and they don’t believe people who carry guns should be returned to our streets.”

Democratic mayors across the country—and the Biden Administration—are also announcing new strategies. Last year, President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland launched a Justice Department initiative to reduce violent crimes by slowing the spread of illegal guns. The department has created five regional strike forces to target gun-trafficking corridors, required U.S. Attorney’s offices to update and enhance joint strategies with local law enforcement tailored to specific regions, and provided roughly seven hundred and fifty million dollars in grants to reduce violent crime. Hours before the killing of the young police officer in New York, in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Garland announced that the Biden Administration is requesting a billion dollars from Congress in additional community-policing grants. “While many of the public-safety challenges our cities face require a unique and tailored approach, gun violence is a universal challenge and one that demands comprehensive action,” Garland said.

The trafficking of firearms up Interstate 95 from Southern states with laxer gun-control laws to New York and other large Northeastern cities where they are sold at a profit has become so common that law-enforcement officials refer to the highway as the “Iron Pipeline.” Biden and Garland also announced a crackdown on “ghost guns”—difficult-to-trace firearms that are often bought online and shipped in parts that can be assembled after delivery. They proposed a rule change that would eliminate loopholes in federal regulations that allow certain firearm parts to be manufactured without serial numbers because they are not, legally, firearms until they are assembled. Anyone legally barred from buying firearms can order ghost-gun kits online because a background check is not required for purchase. In December, a tech-savvy thirteen-year-old boy in Georgia, who ordered ghost-gun kits and then assembled the weapons at home and sold them, accidentally shot and killed his fourteen-year-old sister.

Republican elected officials describe the country as lawless under Biden and big-city Democratic mayors—and mostly scoff at such measures. Efforts to “defund” police departments have largely stalled, but conservatives continue to highlight the issue as evidence that Democrats are soft on crime. Some far-right-backed lawmakers in Republican-controlled states are going further, refusing to participate in federal efforts to track illegal guns used in crimes. Last year, the Republican-controlled state legislature in Missouri passed a law prohibiting local law-enforcement officials from participating in federal programs that did so. The law was part of a “Second Amendment sanctuary” movement led by conservative activists who, according to the Times, demand that Republican-controlled state governments act more aggressively by defying the Democratic-controlled federal government on culture-war issues, such as abortion, voting, and gun rights.

Lisa Monaco, the Deputy Attorney General, said that the department filed a statement of interest supporting a lawsuit filed by the city of St. Louis challenging the constitutionality of the Missouri law, which has resulted in at least a dozen officers around the state declining to participate in federal gun-tracing programs. “Our focus, my focus is: What’s the impact on our ability to actually do the enforcement job, to do the job of protecting communities?” Monaco told me. “We’ve seen a retreat from participation on our task forces, things like the A.T.F. task forces, and providing information, providing guns for us to trace.” Monaco said that the Biden Administration’s approach is centered on identifying the gun traffickers and repeat offenders who are the main sources of gun violence and working closely with community members and local law enforcement. Asked about prioritizing high arrest numbers, a strategy touted by some Republicans, Monaco declined to comment on the efforts and approaches of previous Administrations. “What we’re focussed on is addressing the most significant drivers of violent crime,” she said. “The repeat offenders, the gun trafficking, and the gun violence and doing it with communities.”

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