All we really had to say was that they’re Democrats busily ruining the cities they’re mayors of, just like the 200 others who signed that petition.

More than 200 mayors, including two anguished by mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, are urging the Senate to return to the Capitol to act on gun safety legislation amid criticism that Congress is failing to respond to back-to-back shootings that left 31 people dead.

In a letter Thursday to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, the mayors wrote, “Our nation can no longer wait for our federal government to take the actions necessary to prevent people who should not have access to firearms from being able to purchase them.”

The mayors urged the Senate to vote on two House-passed bills expanding background checks for gun sales that passed that chamber earlier this year. It was signed by El Paso, Texas, Mayor Dee Margo, Dayton, Ohio, Mayor Nan Whaley and others where mass shootings have occurred, including Orlando and Parkland, Florida, Pittsburgh and Annapolis, Maryland.

“Quick passage of these bills is a critical step to reducing gun violence in our country,” they wrote.

The four Louisiana mayors engaging in this shameless, stupid publicity stunt are the usual suspects – LaToya Cantrell, Sharon Weston Broome, Jamie Mayo and Adrian Perkins. They took time out of their busy schedules presiding over the decline of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Monroe and Shreveport, respectively, to engage in the usual national Democrat gun-grabbing.

Somebody should point out to these four clowns that thanks to their rotten leadership many of the streets of the cities they govern are so dangerous that you need a gun to make it through the day alive. This is so because they and their predecessors have trashed the local economies and run most of the middle class to the suburbs, leaving large areas with little or no commercial activity to speak of and even less hope by the residents of social or economic advancement.

And to mask that shameful performance we get “woke” virtue-signaling and letters fantasizing that passing another law infringing on individual liberties will solve a cultural problem they’ve contributed to for decades.

These mass shootings – which statistically aren’t more numerous than in the past, an indication that the real problem isn’t mass shootings but mass media coverage of them as though they’re little Super Bowls for cable news channels – are only shootings because guns are available. Get rid of the guns and they’ll be bombings or stabbings.

Or shootings, because – surprise! – the people committing them are criminals and criminals don’t much care what the law says.

“I’d get a gun and kill 20 people, except it would be illegal to have the gun.” That seems to be what Cantrell, Broome and the rest of the clowns think the effect of more gun control would be. It’s absurd.

Meanwhile, Monroe’s economy is hanging on by a thread waiting for CenturyLink to finally finish the job of picking up and leaving town; Mayo needed the state to drop a mountain of incentive money on the company earlier this year to stave off that extinction until after this fall’s election. And in Baton Rouge Broome had to get a bailout by the state yesterday so as to put up $2 million per year in matching funds to draw down some $255 million in federal flood protection funding – because she’s such a disastrously incompetent leader that she can’t find $2 million per year in a billion-dollar budget to match that money herself. As for Perkins, where do we start? The next true statement he offers as mayor of Shreveport will be his first, and the next good fiscal decision he makes will surely be a sign of the apocalypse.

Then there’s Cantrell, whose ceaseless idiocy has actually made some utter the previously inconceivable statement that maybe Mitch Landrieu wasn’t so bad. That’s heresy, of course, but it’s a sign of the times when the city of New Orleans is actually sponsoring demonstrations outside ICE’s field office and paying criminals’ bail while failing to do simple things like cleaning storm drains so the city doesn’t take on four feet of water every time a hard rain comes.

None of these people are qualified to make federal policy on a complicated subject like guns. They are the very reason for the 2nd Amendment. The founders knew incompetent and demagogic politicians would inevitably stick their noses in our liberties and so built the strongest bulwark possible – the right to bear arms and instill fear in them so as to impose restraint on their tyrannical desires – into the founding document.

Stay out of our gun closet, LaToya. You’re not qualified to be in there. That goes for you, too, Sharon, and Jamie and Adrian. Try getting a few simple things right for once before you try to play with the big boys and girls.