“And maybe you couldn’t call it a miracle, because no one had been spared by its survival. But you could take it as a sign, even a sacrament — that’s what they taught us in high school, that a sacrament was a sign — that showed there is always some refuge, even in the depths of the fire.” —from Edward Conlon’s Blue Blood

It’s both a wrenchingly beautiful thing and a hauntingly awful one, the tribute that cops and their fellow first responders pay to a fallen comrade. You’ll see it here:

Our hearts are heavy as we honor our fallen brother, Police Officer Jonathan Diller. We pray for his family and brothers and sisters in blue as we cope with this immense loss.

Thank you to all those who helped our grieving department transfer Jonathan with the respect he… pic.twitter.com/kfptGnrMsc

— Edward A. Caban (@NYPDPC) March 26, 2024

Fidelis Ad Mortem, it says just beneath the fallen officer’s end-of-watch date. Faithful Unto Death. And he was, by all accounts.

“Our hearts are heavy,” said New York City Police Commissioner Ed Caban, “as we honor our fallen brother, Police Officer Jonathan Diller. We pray for his family and brothers and sisters in blue as we cope with this immense loss. Thank you to all those who helped our grieving department transfer Jonathan with the respect he deserved.”

Deep-blue New York City has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation. Just ask Mayor Eric Adams. He’ll tell you.

And yet those laws didn’t do a darn thing to protect Officer Diller, husband to Stephanie and father to baby Ryan, who never made it home to them on Monday night. Instead, Officer Diller was shot and killed late that afternoon while conducting a routine vehicle check in Queens.

In this case, the driver of the suspicious car had 14 priors, including one for attempted murder. The shooter, meanwhile, who sat in the passenger seat, had 21 priors and a homemade shiv stored in his rectum — you know, just in case he needed to use it on someone in lockup.

As ABC 7 News reports: “NYPD officials say the officers stopped the vehicle, which had two men inside, because it was parked at a bus stop illegally. Investigators believe they were casing a nearby T-Mobile store. When officers asked the individuals to step out of the vehicle, the suspect in the passenger’s seat refused, and pointed a gun at the officers.”

When the murdering dog opened fire, he hit Officer Diller in the lower torso, just below his bullet-resistant vest. There are no “good” places to get shot, but there are certainly very bad ones. And the lower torso is just that. Diller’s partner fired back, hitting the assailant in the back. And though the fallen officer was rushed to Jamaica Hospital in critical condition, he couldn’t be saved.

As for the predictable calls for gun control — those that invariably follow mass shootings but rarely follow cop killings — we would only note that murderers are, like the rest of us, generally industrious. By that, we mean that if they want to commit mayhem, they’ll find the means to do it, whether with a hammer, a kitchen knife, a machete, a splitting maul, or an SUV. Or a gun. Confounding as it may seem to authorities in New York City and other gun-grabbing locales, if a would-be killer is motivated to use a gun, he’ll find a way to get a gun.

If only New York had passed a 20-strikes-and-you’re-out law, this young man would be alive today. He’d be there to love his wife and help raise his baby boy, one day to honorable manhood and perhaps to follow in his dad’s footsteps among the more than 30,000 uniformed officers of the NYPD. Indeed, Officer Diller came from a real-life Blue Blood family. “Jon, there are no words to describe how devastated we are that you are gone,” wrote Diller’s brother-in-law, who’s also an NYPD cop.

But who are we kidding? Such a statute — much less a three- or four- or five-strikes statute (how many strikes does a guy deserve?) — would be downright draconian by today’s “progressive” post-George Floyd standards and New York City’s revolving-door criminal justice system. But if black lives matter — and they surely do — then blue lives matter not one scintilla less.

We keep going back to the driver’s 14 priors and the shooter’s 21 priors, and we wonder: What kind of society frees animals like this from their rightful place behind bars? What kind of society allows such hopeless recidivists and predators to be turned loose on the rest of us?

If government doesn’t exist to protect the citizenry from precisely this sort of career criminal, then what on earth is its purpose?

We aren’t alone in our thoughts, though. “Monday was one of those days,” writes longtime New York City columnist Michael Goodwin. “The murder of a young police officer during a routine traffic stop and the death of a commuter who was shoved in front of a subway train by a stranger add to the growing belief that the city is speeding downhill.”

He continues, “The twin horrors, in addition to the daily blotter of robberies, assaults and shoplifting, suggest the erosion of public safety is entering a new, dangerous phase, one where criminals have little fear of consequences.”

These are the bitter fruits of bad governance. As the New York Post editorial board puts it, “That damage can’t be undone, but New York’s progressive leaders owe it to Diller, his family, the entire NYPD and the 19 million law-abiding residents of this state to at long last reverse course.”

We’ve paid our respects to Officer Diller here, just as we do with all fallen law enforcement officers. May he and his law-enforcement brothers and sisters rest in peace.

POSTSCRIPT: Would it surprise anyone to know that Joe Biden hasn’t so much as called the family of Officer Diller? Or that he won’t attend the officer’s wake later today, even though he’ll be just 25 miles away at a star-studded $25 million fundraiser with former presidents Clinton and Obama? (Those are rhetorical questions.)