The murder rate in Chicago is spiking, up nearly 200 over what it was at this same time last year, and it has Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot calling for help. On Tuesday, following yet another mass killing, the second in less than a week, Lightfoot lamented, “We must acknowledge this for what it is — a tragedy that has ripped apart families and inflicted intense trauma on several individuals.” Indeed, it is a tragedy. However, true to form, Lightfoot projected the blame for growing violence on Americans’ access to firearms:

What we will likely learn as the details become clearer is that illegal guns continue to plague us. Gun violence continues to have a deep and painful history in our city. Unfortunately, Chicago is not unique. We are part of a club of cities for which no one wants to belong — cities with mass shootings.

Lightfoot is blaming guns to divert attention away from the conveniently ignored real root cause behind this sudden spike in violent crime — her policing policy directives enacted last year in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter “systemically racist police” narrative following the death of George Floyd. “Lightfoot banned the police from chasing criminals, even in the case of some very serious offensives, and her D.A. refuses to prosecute many crimes,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson observed. “The results? Nearly 200 more people have been murdered this year than last.”

What makes this worse is the fact that at this time last year, as the city’s violent crime rates were beginning to spike, then-President Donald Trump offered to send federal officers to help the Chicago PD quell the violence. Due to an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, however, the offer so offended Lightfoot that she huffed, “Under no circumstances will I allow Donald Trump’s troops to come to Chicago and terrorize our residents.” Her residents are terrorizing themselves well enough, thank you very much.

In further explaining her rationale at the time, Lightfoot ironically exposed her own hypocrisy:

There are some things the federal government is uniquely qualified to handle. We would welcome that. What we do not welcome, and what we will not tolerate, and we will fight against is the deployment of unnamed federal special secret agents onto our streets to detain people without cause and effectively take away their civil rights and their civil liberties without due process.

No one was proposing that, of course. But now Lightfoot wants to blame Americans’ Second Amendment right to bear arms in self-defense while calling on the feds to essentially enforce Chicago’s restrictive gun control laws across the entire nation:

This is a national problem. Cities individually cannot tackle this problem. We just cannot. In Chicago, we’ve done absolutely everything possible and we need help from the federal government. When guns are so porous that they can come across our borders as we see every single day in Chicago, we know that we have to have a multi-jurisdictional, national solution to this horrible plague of gun violence.

Who knew that porous borders were a problem?

Yet, as Chicago Police Chief David Brown observed last June, the spiking violent crime rate was mostly due to a “lack of consequences” for criminals — even when breaking the city’s own gun control laws. “Electronic monitoring and low bond amounts given to offenders endangers our residents and flies in the face of the hard work our police officers put in on a daily basis to take them off the streets,” Brown stated.

Finally, none of Lightfoot’s cognitive dissonance on this topic should be a surprise given her behavior with her own staff, which has come to light via released emails. Bordering on the maniacal, Lightfoot browbeats her staff over apparently minor issues, such as “I need office time every day!” That sentence was repeated verbatim 16 times in a row in one email. “Unstable” might be the best way to describe Lightfoot, and it certainly describes her response to the spiking murder rate in Chicago.