Chicago Mayor and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is famous for saying that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste since it allows you to do things you might not be able to get done except for the emotions of the moment spurring calls to action.

Chicago’s bloody Memorial Day weekend, which saw a dozen people killed -- including a four-year-old-girl -- certainly proved no exception to Rahm’s Rule as he called for, wait for it, stricter gun control as he spoke at a luncheon honoring police officers for valor and service. “It’s not just about how many police you have, it’s about the quantity of guns that are on the street so we actually have gun laws that back up the men and women we just recognized,” Emanuel said.

This delusional sentiment warning that otherwise inanimate objects are the problem was echoed by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest after a bloody holiday weekend in Baltimore saw 29 shot and nine killed:

When asked about the violence yesterday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest suggested more gun control was one of the solutions.

“Obviously there’s some common sense things we could do -- certainly passage of some gun safety laws in Congress that could keep guns out of the hands of criminals would be one thing that we could do to try to limit the violence,” Earnest said.

In response to this liberal talking point, which ignores the fact that Democratic bastions like Chicago and Maryland have the strictest gun control laws in the nation, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke went on Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs to say that Rahmbo, a nicknamed earned for his White House ruthlessness,  was shooting blanks in suggesting the problem was guns and not the criminals who use them:

Sheriff Clarke describes Emanuel as “dead wrong,” observing that “he must have gone to the same school that ‘president’ Barack Obama did on how to run a law enforcement agency. This is what happens when you have community organizers and academic elites and others who don’t know a thing about policing in the American ghetto start to dabble in police science.”

He says the cities experiencing these heightened levels of violence “might as well get used to it because this is what you’re going to have as long as you’re going to try to turn cops into social workers and you’re going to try to get them to emphasize de-escalation and more dialogue instead of going on the offensive to go after some very dangerous individuals.”

Indeed as Investor’s Business Daily noted in 2013, the problem in Chicago has historically not been gun violence, but gang violence:

The fact is that up to 80% of Chicago's murders and shootings are gang-related, according to police.

By one estimate, the city has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of cops. A police audit last spring identified 59 gangs and 625 factions -- mostly on the south and west sides -- none of which is going to submit to things like universal background checks.

In 2014, city fathers were crowing about a drop in the crime rate over the prior year, but did not bother to acknowledge its connection to Illinois being the last state in the nation to allow some form of concealed carry:

Chicago Police Superintendent Gerry McCarthy, at a recent city council hearing, reported the good news of less crime. He credited better police work, but there's another factor McCarthy left unstated -- the increase in the number of pistol-packing permits that let citizens defend themselves, their families and their neighbors. The law has left criminals uncertain of who might be able to shoot back.

"It isn't any coincidence that crime rates started to go down when concealed carry was permitted," Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, said in the Washington Times.

"Just the idea that criminals don't know who is armed and who isn't has a deterrent effect. The police department hasn't changed a single tactic -- they haven't announced a shift in policy -- and you have these incredible numbers."

The answer to crime, largely gang crime, would seem not to be taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, or putting what liberals call “sensible restrictions” on their uses. And it certainly doesn’t reside, according to Sheriff Clarke, in sensitivity training for police or turning them into community organizers. As we have seen in Baltimore, when police are made the bad guys, crime soars:

Clarke says “It’s starting to take its toll on the American police officer, the psyche of the American police officer; self-initiated policing is going to go down, proactive policing is going to go down in many of these areas and cops are just going to resort to answering calls for service. That’s what they’re paid to do, that’s what they’re expected to do.”

He describes the current attitude of police as “Why should they risk their life or end up on some criminal indictment because this whole thing has been politicized?” He points out how the Democrat method of dealing with the problem is to “deflect away from the behavior of many young black males in the American ghetto and instead pile on the law enforcement officer.” He points out that “In the end the loser in all of this are the good law-abiding black people that live in these ghettos and there are a lot of them.”

The root cause of violence in our cities is not bad white cops or guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens and law-enforcing police. It is the decay bred by liberal governance and the excuses made by liberals for the consequences of their policies. Scapegoating white cops and gun owners is not the solution.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.