Last Sunday, during a roundtable discussion on NBC’s Meet the Press, Representative Raul Labrador (R-ID) made the mistake of attributing seven recent homicides to the District of Columbia, when in fact they had occurred in neighboring Prince George’s County. Despite the fact that all Labrador (or someone on his staff) had to do to avoid the error was simply look at this website which said the District had only experienced three homicides at the time of his comment, we were still willing to cut the guy a break. After all, we realize that it’s incredibly easy for some members of Congress to simply lump our region together into one homogenous geographical glob.

Any chance we can retract that offer of clemency? Labrador, instead of simply copping to his mistake and admitting that he didn’t know where D.C. ended and P.G. began, had his chief of staff say that the Representative actually meant to say “shootings” instead of “murders.” The Idaho Statesman has the kinda-sorta retraction:

Labrador meant to say there had been seven shootings in Washington during that time period, not murders, said Labrador’s chief of staff, former National Rifle Association lobbyist John Goodwin. Labrador has corrected his statement with “Meet the Press.”

Labrador also was specifically referring to Washington D.C.’s gun laws and gun violence, not Maryland’s, Goodwin said. There has been some speculation by Washington-area television stations and a website that the congressman was mistakenly referring to Maryland’s Prince George’s County, a suburb that’s been home to a surge of violence in the new year.

[UPDATE: Labrador spokesperson Phil Hardy didn’t mention anything about “shootings” when he contacted Meet the Press last Sunday and apologized for when Labrador “misspoke…in regard to the number of homicides in the District of Columbia this year.” Thanks to a commenter for the link.]

Uh, alrighty then. Call it speculation or blame the local media all you’d like — but there’s was only one jurisdiction around Washington that had experienced seven murders in the week before Labrador made his comments, and it’s wasn’t the one in which he earns a paycheck.