Anytime there’s a high-profile shooting, the usual suspects turn to groups like the National Rifle Association and tries to place the blame on them. It’s the NRA’s fault because they won’t bow down and support the infringements on our liberty that these people actually want. If they’d just supported universal background checks, this mass shooting committed by an individual who passed a background check would have been stopped.

Yet right now, we’re seeing a lot of shootings. In fact, we’re seeing a lot of what are technically classified as mass shootings.

And this time, someone else is getting blamed.

Even as gun violence breaks records in New York City, Chicago and Philly, the Democrats don’t have much to say about the epidemic of shootings or their pet cause, gun control. While activist Democrat prosecutors like Attorney General Letitia James have neglected to deal with the violence and are instead targeting the NRA, they aren’t really talking about gun control.

Mass shootings are rarely mentioned anymore even though there are more of them than ever.

A Washington, D.C., mass shooting at a cookout last month that wounded 20 people was treated as another local crime story. And there are a lot of these local crime stories as shootings rise.

New York City has blown past 1,000 shootings, of all kinds, individual and mass, Philly hit 1,300 and Chicago is approaching 3,000 shootings.

Three Democrat cities alone will soon account for some 5,000 shootings.

These are the kinds of numbers we used to see out of Iraq. Now we see them in America.

The Gun Violence Archive recently tweeted that it “had never totaled more than 60 mass shootings in a single month—it has now eclipsed that number for four straight months, and September is on pace to do the same.”

…

In just the first eight days of September, there were 21 mass shootings.

And these mass shootings are inescapably tied to the Black Lives Matter violence that crippled police, wrecked public safety and led Democrats to call for an end to cops.

Every full month in which BLM riots and rallies took place has recorded more mass shootings than the first three months of the year combined.

The big question is whether Black Lives Matter is really responsible, and that’s a stickier issue than many of us would like to think. (Let’s not get into the idiotic way the Gun Violence Archive counts “mass shootings” for the moment.)

On one hand, there’s no doubt in my mind that their anti-police rhetoric and the push to defund police departments has emboldened many criminals, especially as they see accused rapist Jacob Blake be celebrated as a hero for getting himself shot. In that regard, yes, Black Lives Matter is responsible.

But those are also second-order effects. They’re not directly encouraging people to go out and shoot one another.

At the end of the day, I don’t think this kind of rhetoric is productive. Yes, I disagree with a lot of what BLM has to say. If they say something that’s not stupid or vile, it’s usually by accident. I’ll also say that this kind of language is only going to encourage more shootings.

Where I draw the line, however, is in blaming anyone for the actions of another with a clear line proving they somehow made that person act. Just as the NRA isn’t responsible for shootings like Parkland or El Paso, BLM isn’t responsible for what lawless criminals do.

If we’re going to say the bad guys are responsible for their actions, that has to hold true across the board.