Sarcasm alert: It’s hard to blame Democrat New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy for going after guns in the wake of the gang-related shootout at a Trenton arts festival over the weekend. Just place yourself in his shoes.

Imagine if you had been running on reducing prison sentences and bringing back a parole board. Then imagine that one of those let loose by the parole board you reconstituted was a violent gang member. We’re talking a convicted killer who then received an additional sentence for helping a gang leader run his gang from prison.

Said killer is then let loose after serving 14 years of what should have been 24 years in the slammer. Despite some of the most restrictive, if not the most restrictive gun laws in the country, said gang member and at least two others obtained guns and engaged in a gang-related shootout that left 22 people wounded. The shooter was killed by police.

You’d be facing two tough choices. Choice one is to brazen it out, attack gun rights (even though your state’s strict laws did not stop a convicted killer from getting his hands on a gun). Choice two is to fess up that maybe you messed up. No way Murphy was going through Door Number Two.

Murphy should have learned from former Massachusetts Gov. and Democrat presidential candidate Michael Dukakis’s 1980s prison furlough program. Remember Willie Horton? Oh, the Left re-wrote history to make it all about racism, but the fact was, if Horton had been kept in jail, he wouldn’t have committed a rape among a host of other crimes.

The same logic applies here. If the 33-year-old gang member killed by cops responding to the Trenton shooting hadn’t been released, the Trenton art festival would have been just another local interest story. None of the 22 injured in the gang shootout would have been hit by anything.

What is doubly aggravating is that this shooting, like the Parkland and Sutherland Springs massacres before it, would never have happened had the government simply done what it is supposed to do. Yet after clear indications that such basic competence is lacking among the agencies tasked to protect the public, we’re supposed to just give up significant portions of our Second Amendment rights? We don’t think so.

Anti-Second Amendment politicians like Murphy are surprised when those who love Liberty fight their tyrannical advances. Their response is to then call these law-abiding Americans “domestic terrorists.”

Gov. Murphy, if he had a shred of integrity or decency, wouldn’t have attacked what remains of Second Amendment rights in New Jersey. Sadly, he chose to scapegoat millions of law-abiding Americans rather than admit that it was his actions that let a convicted killer back onto the streets to wreak havoc.