WELCOME, MARYLAND — A 16th week had passed with no arrest in the murder of Patrice Parker’s son, another week in which she had struggled through grief for him and fear for herself and her surviving daughters.

It wasn’t just that the person who had turned a gun on 24-year-old Markelle Morrow was still at large, but that so many other armed criminalswere as well.

Shootings were ravaging the nation’s capital, on track for its highest number of homicides in two decades. In Prince George’s County, where Parker lives, carjackings had more than quadrupled since 2019.

But there was a place where she felt safe, and that was here, at a remote property amid thick woods an hour’s drive south of her home in District Heights, Md. And there was no time the 52-year-old felt safer than when holding a weapon like the one her friend Mark “Choppa” Manley now handed her: a 9mm pistol similar to those that regularly ring out in neighborhoods experiencing the worst of the region’s bloody summer.

“I’ve got some ammo […]