Upon hearing that eight cops had been shot in a single American city since June, you’d be excused for thinking it a mistake. We must be talking about Juarez or Tijuana or Caracas or some other lawless hellhole to our south, right?

Wrong.

Two police officers were shot in St. Louis on Saturday, one of them fatally. That takes the Gateway City’s grim total from six to eight, and it causes us to wonder about the sickness that’s overtaken our nation’s Democrat-controlled urban centers. It used to be that the shooting of a cop was a rarity; now it’s becoming commonplace.

The slain officer, Tamarris L. Bohannon, a member of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, was shot in the head while responding to a call. He died yesterday at St. Louis University Hospital. Another officer was shot in the leg and was treated and released.

As Fox News reports, “The 29-year-old officer was survived by his wife and three children. His family penned a letter posted on Twitter by the police department that called him a ‘hero to many but most importantly to his loving wife and three incredible children.’”

Bohannon had been a member of the force for three and a half years. He was raised in St. Louis and, as this heartbreaking handwritten note from his family tells us, he was raising his own family there as well.

According to the SLMPD, “A 43-year-old white male was taken into custody after a lengthy stand-off w/officers. He was taken to a hospital for evaluation and released to our custody. No officers were injured during the stand-off and no shots were fired by officers.”

So here we have a black cop murdered in cold blood by a white man. One wonders why the Black Lives Matter legions haven’t taken to the streets in St. Louis over this death. Well, actually, we’re not wondering at all. As this utterly obscene and hate-filled rant makes clear, the battle lines are already drawn — with cops and Republicans on one side, and BLM thugs and Democrats on the other. “I’m at the point where I’m ready to put these police in the f—ing grave. I’m at the point where I want to burn the f—ing White House down,” the man is heard yelling to a Washington, DC, crowd. “I want to take it to the senators. I want to take it to the Congress. I want to take the fight to them. And at the end of the day, if they ain’t going to hear us, we burn them the f—k down.”

Even to those who haven’t been paying attention, law and order has emerged as a powerful campaign issue in the 2020 election — much to the chagrin of Democrats, for whom it’s a losing issue. Show us a Democrat from Joe Biden on down, and we’ll show you a weakling on law and order.

It’s an issue that Democrats are only now waking up to, and only now scrambling to recover from. It’s also causing them to bleed support from their most loyal constituency — black voters.

Because, as it turns out, blacks want to live and raise their families in safe communities every bit as much as whites do. And a political party that doesn’t understand this fundamental truth has no business being in power, nor should it expect the votes of black Americans.