In 2022, York, Pennsylvania, weathered 22 homicides, a record number of slayings that gave the growing industrial city of 45,000 a higher homicide rate than Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the state’s biggest cities.
One particularly brazen incident shocked officials into action. On July 6, 2022, Shaheim Carr, 27, left a house near downtown York. Four men chased Carr into a breezeway and fired nearly 100 bullets. The shots killed Carr and sprayed gunfire into nearby buildings, including into the home of the mother of York’s City Council president, Edquina Washington.
Among other incidents, the shooting prompted Washington to sponsor two gun-safety bills, despite pushback from gun rights supporters. One bill, approved last year, banned ghost guns, weapons that lack serial numbers. The other banned machine gun converters, including Glock switches, devices that modify handguns so that they can fire like fully automatic weapons. It was approved this September…