By ANJETTA McQUEEN AP Education Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – Calling on Congress to pass more stringent gun laws, the nation’s mayors displayed on Thursday a “wall of death,” filled with the names of nearly 3,100 Americans fatally shot since the killings at Columbine High School.

“Our hope is the tragic message of this wall will not be missed on Capitol Hill,” Denver Mayor Wellington E. Webb said, standing before a black, 10-foot board with victims’ names recorded in white and the date of their deaths in red. “It’s time for Congress to do its part.”

Webb, who is president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting here this week, called on Congress to renew its work on gun restrictions.

Last spring, in consideration of a juvenile justice bill, the Senate passed new provisions requiring background checks at gun shows. But a similar set of proposals died in the House when Republicans complained the measures were too strong and some Democrats said they were too weak. Work on the gun legislation continues.

The bloodshed didn’t end with Columbine, Webb said, noting last year’s other high-profile school and workplace shootings, which included the November slaying of seven at a Xerox office building in Honolulu.

Mayors are on the front lines of the battle, New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial said in releasing a survey on gun deaths. “We attend the funerals,” he said. “We comfort the families. We clean up the blood.”

The 3,094 victims’ names and ages on the movable wall were reported from the group’s survey of 100 cities, which recorded gun-related homicides from April 20, 1999 – the date of the high school shootings in Littleton, Colo. – through Dec. 31, 1999.

Chicago, with a population of about 2.7 million, was the largest city in the survey. It recorded the largest death toll at 343. The smallest city surveyed – Superior, Wis., which has a population of 27,500 – reported a single death.

Eleven cities had no gun violence deaths in the period reported, but among the other 89 cities surveyed, not a day went by without a gun fatality.

The next highest death counts were reported in: Detroit with 273; Baltimore, 197; Houston, 186; Miami-Dade County, Fla., 169; and Philadelphia, 164. Denver, the nearest city to Littleton, reported 35 deaths.

The victims ranged in age from 2 to 96, but one in three were 18 to 25 years old. Most of the deaths were homicides. Not all cities distinguished accidental shootings or suicides.

The mayors want congressional action on gun control, but a separate conference meeting on school violence, it was the mayors who were asked to take action.

“I wish school violence was something that educators could solve alone, but it is not,” said Pam Rafferty, a teacher at Heath High School in Paducah, Ky., where three students were killed in 1997. “It is a community issue.”

Judy Forney-Hantle, another teacher from the school, said cities must help schools hire school officers and nurses, counsel students and families, and develop emergency plans.

“We don’t like to think of having a mass crisis at a school, but the reality is that we live in a world where it happens,” she said.