If you want to know how to be a successful mayor of a large city, the answer is actually pretty easy. All you have to do is take credit for everything good that happens and blame everything bad on the federal government. That’s what Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot does.

Now, to be fair, the federal government could screw up pretty much anything. This is a government that took over a legal brothel and couldn’t make money with it. To say they’re responsible for plenty of mistakes is putting it mildly.

Yet Lightfoot routinely blames the government for the wrong things. What’s worse, she wants them to clean up her own messes.

As Chicago reeled from yet another mass shooting, this one Tuesday morning in the Englewood neighborhood, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called on the federal government to “step up” and help cities across America tackle gun violence.

After extending her condolences to the families of the four people killed and the four others wounded, Lightfoot said what Chicago needs is a partnership with Washington to stem the flow of illegal guns into the city. Though she didn’t elaborate, and while it is not yet clear whether illegal guns were involved in Tuesday’s shooting, she revived her demands for stricter gun control laws nationwide and said the type of heightened violence that has plagued the city recently is not unique to Chicago.

“This is a national problem, and it needs a national solution,” Lightfoot said during an unrelated news conference.

But when asked about how Chicago can safely reopen from the coronavirus pandemic with crime still present, the mayor balked and said, “The reality is our city is safe. And I stand by that.”

Well…that’s special.

Keep in mind that the only reason illegal guns are flowing into Chicago is that the gun laws there make it attractive to criminal entrepreneurs to transport them there. The bad guys there would get guns one way or another, but there’s enough incentive to make transporting them profitable, thus negating any potential benefit from the gun control laws.

While Lightfoot routinely turns to Washington to fix Chicago’s problems, she ignores the fact that violent crime across the nation has plummeted for decades with no new gun control laws or any exceptional amount of attention on gun trafficking. Instead, the problem was resolved using a variety of programs that had absolutely nothing to do with gun control.

These are measures Chicago could start implementing right away, but Lightfoot won’t even consider them.

See, the problem with anti-gunners is that they can’t think of any potential solution that’s not gun control. If it were really about making communities safer, wouldn’t it make sense to look at all possible solutions and work toward implementing those we can agree on first?

The fact is, though, people like Lightfoot can’t see any way to make Chicago safer without focusing on guns. That’s because other proven efforts have been decried as racist, like broken window policing, even though it works.

Don’t expect Lightfoot to back off on this, but on the same token, don’t really expect the feds to do anything, either.