Gun violence high on list of issues at Columbus meeting of mayors

Last Memorial Day weekend had barely wrapped up when Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas joined his police chief and county prosecutor on Wednesday to go over the stats — seven homicides in 72 hours during the holiday weekend.

“We are not giving up. We’re in this; we’re in it together," Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said during a media briefing. "And we’re here for the same mission. And that is to make this city safe for everyone.”

Noting the gun violence occurring across his metro area, Lucas said at the briefing: “I think all of us are having a moment of crisis."

Starting Friday, hundreds of mayors from across the nation will meet in Columbus at the U.S. Conference of Mayors' 91st annual meeting to share ideas and promote change, and one thing high on the group's collective minds is dealing with increasing gun violence.

Related: UNDER FIRE | A look at gun violence and shootings in Columbus, Ohio

Lucas, who chairs the conference's Criminal and Social Justice Standing Committee, will preside over presentations on preventing violent extremism, how cities navigate mass shootings and the lessons learned from the high-profile Memphis death of Tyre Nichols, who was beaten at the hands of officers.

"The rhetoric has gotten worse by far, so I think solutions at the state capitals are increasingly nonexistent," Lucas said. "... I do think, though, that we've seen a very significant crime spike in some cities, and frankly if you go back the last five years, you've seen crime spikes in every city."

Even the area around the Greater Columbus Convention Center itself has recently been the focus of violence, after 10 people were shot in the Short North just last month in a single night, turning an almost mile-long stretch of High Street into a massive closed-off crime scene. Since then, the city has swarmed the area with police on weekends — a trend expected to continue at least through the conference.

The arrival of summer weather has put the city on high alert, following record-breaking deadly violence in both 2020 and 2021. During the summer months over the past five years, the city has averaged nearly 38 homicides between June 1 and Sept. 1.

More: Ohio divided: Ohio's gun laws have seen major changes in 20 years. What happened?

One of the solutions put forward by the far left for gun violence across the nation — to simply defund the police — "was a serious waste of time" in addressing the gun problem, Lucas said.

"The politics of policing have moved beyond the 2020-2021 fund/defund type of discussion," Lucas said. "I think those debates are purely performative from either (political) direction."

The new focus for "serious mayors" is how do we do a better job of reducing gun trafficking on the streets and make law enforcement a safer job for officers, he said.

More: He was paralyzed in a random shooting at Dick’s Den. Here’s what his life looks like now.

"That doesn't mean that they just have a runaway budget, but what it does mean is how can we do what's best for our community?" Lucas said. "... What you will not hear is anything related to the defund, abolish, all that debate."

Cities may leave the conference with a plan to band together to use their massive public safety purchasing power to contractually demand gun and ammunition manufacturers do all they can to reduce illegally trafficked guns, Lucas said.

"I think ultimately what you will hear (from the conference) is us believing that this is something that is almost existential for the American city," Lucas said, saying the decline of many big cities — including those in Ohio — can be tied to perceptions concerning public safety.

"And we need to have at least a cohesive discussion about how we all believe in safety and how we will make things better in our cities if we expect our cities to grow stronger long-term," he said.

Lucas will also highlight a Missouri law called the "Second Amendment Preservation Act," where the state legislature has attempted to thwart local and federal law enforcement from working together on anything gun control-related. The Justice Department sued to overturn the law after the Missouri state crime lab, operated by the state's Highway Patrol, refused to process evidence that would help federal firearms prosecutions and stopped cooperating with federal agencies investigating federal firearms offenses, suspending joint efforts to enforce federal firearms laws.

"You could think about how that could put handcuffs on DEA, ATF and FBI," Lucas said, saying he predicts the conference will mount strong opposition to such state laws "up to and including a strategy where we see more lawsuits both against states but also against gun manufacturers."

For Subscribers: Columbus gripped by gun violence

"We've for years invested in just lobbyists at state legislatures," Lucas said. "I think we need to expand that focus to courtrooms in more situations, stand up for the rights for our citizens."

The conference will take place Friday through Monday, and will debate other issues, including mental health, immigration, infrastructure and climate change.

The conference was born out of the Great Depression in 1932, when Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy invited the nation’s mayors to his city to confront common problems. The conference is nonpartisan, and its members are the leaders of cities with populations of 30,000 or more, of which there are over 1,400 in the United States.

wbush@gannett.com

@ReporterBush

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Cycle of gun violence on mayors' minds as they converge on Columbus