Washington is, comparatively, riddled with violent crime committed with firearms; despite having some of the most restrictive firearms laws in the nation. Ironic doesn't begin to describe the kind of idiocy it takes to then recommend those same measures for the rest of the country, but alas, they do.
And I assume intentional. This is your work and submission. Exactly what statement are you trying to make? A way to deceive with diagrams?
EDIT: To explain, I haven't looked at the raw data, but reading the diagrams and taking the scale changes into account, there aren't especially big differences year to year, but you're led to believe there are. There could even be an overall nationwide decline for all I know, but the misleading rescaling makes it hard to determine by just looking at the images.
I suspect the "it is strange, isn't it" portion of the comment was meant to be a separate idea and the commenter just failed to make it a separate paragraph.
It (the strangeness) is referring to a separate idea in my post, which was the crime level in Washington DC, not the scaling.
I understand why someone would want to use a balanced distribution scale (even though you get weird boundaries sometimes), its so you get the most dynamic visualization and take full advantage of your color library.
What doesn't make sense is redefining the color scales boundaries every time the year changes. As illustrated in this visualization, it intends to lead the viewers to believe violence is getting worse, when in fact the last years maximum number is 5 times lower than the first year.