It really takes uncommon depravity for someone to use a tragedy such as a shooting to score political points. It is a level of disregard for human life that the vast majority of decent people in America cannot comprehend.
Yet, we seem to have a political stage full of such abjectly depraved people. It is so bad that these people may as well support live-birth abortion. Oh, wait. They do.
As despicable as it was watching all the Democrats running for president scramble over dead bodies to offer the first and most depraved reactions to the recent shootings, it was a political thug in Philadelphia who proved to be the worst.
Six cops were shot last week while risking their lives to make the city safer. A gunman held the officers at bay for hours.
The cesspool city’s mayor — a man named Jim Kenney — flew to the microphones to level blame for the shooting and demand justice.
Did he blame the shooter? The shooter’s parents, who obviously raised some kind of monster? Did he blame his city for the culture of crime that it inspires? Did he blame the pervasive message pushed by his fellow politicians that cops are racist and evil?
No. He blamed law-abiding gun owners.
“If the state and federal government don’t want to stand up to the NRA and some other folks, then let us,” he harangued.
“But they preempt us on all kinds of gun control legislation. Our officers deserve to be protected and they don’t deserve to be shot by a guy for hours with an unlimited supply of weapons and an unlimited supply of bullets.”
Now, remember, for dumb and dishonest politicians like Mr. Kenney, the NRA is just a boogeyman stand-in for “law-abiding gun owners” across America. These dumb and dishonest politicians attack the NRA because they know they won’t pay a political price for attacking the NRA, while they would be roundly spanked for attacking lawful citizens across the country.
The truth is that if there is any political blame for any shooting, then the shooting of six Philadelphia cops lies directly at the feet of Mayor Jim Kenney himself. Literally, the blood of those cops is on his hands.
Now we can talk all day about what made shooter Maurice Hill such a monster, but there is no mystery as to why a hardened criminal like him had “an unlimited supply of weapons and an unlimited supply of bullets,” which he used to send six police officers to the hospital.
It is because prosecutors and judges and politicians in Philadelphia — powerful people like Mr. Kenney — have so little regard for human life, especially the lives of cops.
Records show what Mr. Hill has been arrested more than a dozen times since he turned 18 in 2001. The charges against him range from kidnapping to attempted murder. Yet most startling are the number of times he has been arrested and charged for — you guessed it — illegal gun possession.
More staggering is the number of times those charges were simply dropped by prosecutors in Philadelphia.
If gun laws are truly the answer to gun violence in America — and in many cases they are — then let’s start with the simple, obvious ones. If you violate gun laws, you will be charged and you will be prosecuted and you will pay the price. In the case of Mr. Hill, you would be in jail.
And six Philadelphia cops would not have been shot last week.
• Contact Charles Hurt at churt@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @charleshurt.