As we count down the days left in 2023.

Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg is reflecting on his first year in office in an interview with CT.

He says public safety is his administration's first priority.

He talked passionately and extensively about reducing gun violence and his frustrations with state and federal laws that keep him from achieving his goals for the city.

When it comes to gun violence.

That might be the area where I have the most frustration.

Looking back on my first year in office.

We want to do everything we can locally to reduce the amount of gun violence that's happening in Louisville, but that's one of the biggest challenges.

The city of Louisville is handcuffed by state and federal laws that do not let us do more.

We want to do more.

We want to prevent firearms that we confiscate from ever ending up back on the street.

We want to do more so that people who should not possess guns like convicted violent crime offenders, convicted felons should not have guns.

Individuals who are in mental health crisis should not have gotten so they cannot use them for the wrong reason.

We need help from the state to change the laws.

We need help from our federal government to change the laws to give us more tools here locally to do what we know needs to be done to make our city safer.

We did come out with the plan going as far as we could under the current law.

Even if I don't agree with the law, I believe it's important to follow the law.

And so that we did.

And so we're removing the firing pins before we turn over any confiscated weapons that have been used in a crime to the state as required under state law to hopefully those don't end up back on the street and commit more crimes.

We would have liked to have gone further.

State law prevents us from doing that.

Our laws in Kentucky right now state that me as mayor, my colleagues on Metro Council as legislators.

If we were to take any actions to go further, we would be committing a crime ourselves to crack down on gun violence.

This is insane.

This is dangerous.

And this is why we in Louisville need more local autonomy to address the gun violence epidemic that we're dealing with here in our city.

Mayor Greenberg also discussed the city's push for universal pre-K, something that Governor Beshear is calling for statewide.

More on the mayor's plan tomorrow on Kentucky Edition.