Short and sweet today, mostly because I started late, but also because it's sunny outside and I am going to run grab breakfast. So happy Wednesday.

Yes, I know there has been a stretch of negative things that have happened in the last few days - although frankly, I thought the Michael Steele thing was hilarious - but today I have to lead off with a local incident from last night.

Noticed it on Twitter not long before I walked out the door that DC EMS were responding to a shooting on the 4000 block of South Capitol SE, along with two words at the end, "mass casualty."

The headline in today's Washington Post is "LIKE A WAR ZONE". A gunman, in an apparent drive-by shooting, sprayed bullets into a crowd outside of an apartment building, killing four and leaving five more wounded. In an ensuing police chase that led to three arrests and the recovery of a weapon, four more police officers were slightly injured.

Two quotes from witnesses are chilling:

A man who said he was in the area at the time recounted the sounds he heard as "pat, pat, pat, pat, pat," followed by a loud boom.

Then, "all I saw was bodies dropping," he said. "It was like Vietnam."

Another witness said that as bodies fell, "it was like a pileup at a football game."

Police are saying that the shooter may have used an AK-47 assault rifle. The four officers were injured when two cars crashed during the police chase in what I can only imagine looked like a scene from a movie.

This was by far the most violence that has happened, in a city known for gun violence, since I moved here. Police are saying this may be the largest shooting since 1994 and actually goes against current trends. In 2009 the city logged "just" 143 homicides, its lowest total since 1966. Washington, D.C. was once known as the nation's murder capital. Some might recall that the late Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin changed the name of the team from the Bullets during the 1990's, just as he was building a new arena in what was once a very bad part of the city just blocks from the capitol (and my office).

And speaking of the Wizards, this shooting comes just days after former superstar Gilbert Arenas was basically embraced by a federal judge who gave him just probation and 30 days in a halfway house, stemming from gun charges earlier in the season. Arenas had several guns in the Wizards locker room, a felony in Washington, while also carrying them across state lines from Virginia into the district, another felony.

A look at 2008 data shows Washington as fifth in the country in murders per capita, behind New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit. Baltimore is obviously just a short drive away and often considered part of the same region called the "DMV" or D.C.-Maryland-(Northern) Virginia. Seattle, in case you were wondering, is way down on that list, with just over four murders per capita (D.C. was 31.4, a far cry from New Orleans more than 63) and just above Portland. That number to my knowledge, however, climbed in 2009, but so did the city's population.

One city also notably low on the list is New York City, which is not far above Seattle at 6.3.

A little bit more on this D.C. situation: the area where this occurred is not actually in the main part of Washington, but much closer to a well-known area called Anacostia. It is "across the river", both figuratively and literally. It happened just blocks from the line between the district and Prince George's County, the wealthiest county in the nation with a black majority. From 1985-2006, Prince George's County accounted for some 20 percent of the murders in the entire state of Maryland, but the total number plummeted in 2009, to just 99.

PG county, as it is known out here, is also home to one of the richest basketball and football recruiting bases in the country, producing players like Kevin Durant and Michael Beasley.

The point of this is that, it didn't happen close to me, but it still happened in the same town and that is something that gets ignored around here. People in this town will go on with their daily lives, because that is what is done here. One of the cities in this country hurting the most is the one controlled by this country's government. However, that said, there is no city in the world with more law enforcement and stricter gun laws and these murder rates are in decline.

Days like yesterday just remind us that, not only do we still have much work to do, but we have to remember that "across the river" is part of our city too. I remember when I was younger we used to hear stories about how poverty was rampant just blocks from the White House. I can personally attest to the falseness of that statement. But within miles? Absolutely.

If we look to build our cities from the ground up, we will build in these places too. Because we things like property values climb in what were once the poorest and most crime-ridden areas in our cities, the rise all over the city.

One person I suggest everyone follow and really pay attention to is the mayor of Newark, New Jersey - Cory Booker. He is tackling crime head in the city, with the real goal of building one of the nation's worst cities into one that can compete with nearby New York City for business. Full disclosure: I've been to Newark. It's a mess. I've been to or driven through a lot of ugly cities, including Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland. Newark is by far the worst I've ever seen. Yet, Booker is tackling it. During his campaign he moved into a slum in the middle of the city to build awareness. This is a man who graduated from Stanford.

The world needs 1,000,000 million Cory Bookers.

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My only other thing from today relates to my work, as President Obama will announce today at Andrews Air Force Base that he will support off-shore drilling off of the east coast. Could be a long day.