It’s been a violent year so far in the District—homicides are up 5 percent from this point in 2018, which itself saw a 40 percent spike in murders over 2017. A total of 79 people have been killed this year, and many more shot and seriously injured.

The violence continued over the weekend, with several shootings in the city—two of them fatal and two of them involving children.

Late Saturday night, three people were shot in a drive-by shooting as a bus stop on Southern Avenue in Southeast, according to police. The suspect was driving a dark-colored sedan with tinted windows. Two of the victims in this shooting were children, multiple outlets have reported: one six-year-old girl and one three-year-old boy. Their father was the third person shot, reports WJLA.

Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White posted about the incident on social media, calling the shootings “inhumane.” He said he visited the victims in the hospital and all of them were stable.

Police reported a homicide on Sunday in the 1400 block of W Street NW. Twenty-eight-year-old Christopher Payne was shot multiple times, according to a release from MPD. Police later arrested 21-year-old Duan Garmany in the murder.

A second homicide took place on Sunday at 13th Place SE. Eighteen-year-old Ja’Vontay Brown was found suffering from multiple gunshot wounds and transported to a hospital, where he later died, MPD said in a release.

Shootings and killings have been consistently high throughout the year, and several of them have involved children. In May, five people—one of them a child—were shot near the Barry Farm Recreation Center, the Washington Post reports. Seven other shooting incidents were reported to police that same day, according to the outlet.

Also in May, a 13-year-old boy was shot outside his Northeast D.C. home just a few months after his 12-year-old brother was shot in the same area. D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham called the incidents “mind-boggling,” the Post reported at the time.

Residents of Columbia Heights have organized community meetings and expressed fear this year after several shootings near neighborhood elementary schools.

Earlier this month, a number of stray bullets hit an elementary school in Southeast, one cracking a front window. Washington Mystics Player Natasha Cloud organized a media blackout ahead of a game, saying she would only discuss the shootings at Hendley unless Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. Council came to her with a plan for stemming the constant gun violence.

The shootings and killings have largely taken place in communities east of the river. In April, Ward 7 marked a 300 percent increase in homicides compared to last year.

At the start of the year, Bowser presented several violence-reduction strategies meant to curb the spike in homicides. The proposals involved increasing accountability for illegal gun crimes, creating programs to address trauma in communities, and sealing peoples’ criminal records so they have an easier time getting a job after being convicted of a crime. The mayor also proposed increasing the police force to 4,000 officers from about 3,850.

Newsham has previously blamed the uptick in violence on the prevalence of illegal firearms in the city and the lack of consequences for people who buy and sell them. “The consequences of illegal firearm possession in our city is not changing the behavior. We’re arresting sometimes the same folks over and over again for carrying illegal firearms in the city,” he said last year.

Homicides and shootings in the District have fluctuated in the District in the last two decades, going from a high of 262 in 2002 to a low of 88 in 2012. Violence has been ticking back up in the last several years, and so far, this year has not been a salve.