Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms laid the blame on the spike in shootings in her city on legal gun owners. On an interview “MSNBC Live” on Friday, she was asked by the host to comment on the 124% rise in shootings in her city.

Bottoms first explained that the increase in violent crimes is not just happening in her city but all over the country, which is like saying that it’s not that big of a deal since it’s happening everywhere. She then named other reasons which do not have anything to do with criminality in the streets like the pandemic injustice in the country. By injustice, Bottoms can be taken to refer to racism, which is one of the go-to reasons that leftist politicians have for anything going wrong within their jurisdiction.

“What’s happening in Atlanta is what’s happening across the country. There is a combination of things. There are…these systemic issues, including lack of access to healthcare, including people being unemployed, people are dying of COVID-19. We witness the injustices that have happened in front of our eyes, and it’s boiling over into our streets. It’s happening in Atlanta. It’s happening across the country.”

She then claimed that Atlanta’s overall crime rate is down, but because Georgia is an open carry state, people can walk around carrying rifles and cannot stop them. She’s blaming the legal gun owners who can carry their firearms in the open. But Bottoms is disingenuous with her claims. The problem is that those doing the shootings are not the legal gun owners using high-powered rifles. The gang members who obtained their guns illegally are responsible for the increase in the shootings and usually use pistols. So the real problem is not in the open carry laws of the state but in the enforcement. With the call to defund the police in cities, there is bound to be more increase in street-level violence.

Bottoms and other Democrats like her are pushing for more gun control, but the cities with the strictest gun control laws are the ones that experience high gun violence. That’s because when the laws for owning firearms become strict only criminals will have guns.