Bridgeport’s mass shooting the other day, with 13 people wounded, one critically, was so horrible that even two members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation issued statements about it. Police say two gunmen hid in bushes outside a house party and ambushed the crowd.

But Bridgeport’s U.S. representative, Jim Himes, a Democrat, could only try to squeeze the atrocity into his party’s narrative on gun control, though it was not yet known which guns were used and how they were obtained.

“Instead of standing in cowardly silence,” Himes said, Congress should “take action to prevent these mass shootings and the daily gun violence that affects so many Americans.”

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, also a Democrat, got a little closer to relevance. He said: “I’m simply unable to contemplate the evil behind such contempt for human life.”

The senator should keep trying to contemplate that evil and encourage his colleagues to contemplate it. For that evil isn’t where, for political convenience, they place it — in guns, mere inanimate objects. Rather that evil resides in the people who commit atrocities.

Even after spending so much time striking idle poses and pandering to interest groups, Connecticut’s members of Congress might have noticed by now that these atrocities happen almost entirely in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Waterbury, and the other poverty factories that most cities in the country have become. Indeed, in Waterbury this week four teenagers were charged with a murder committed during a robbery — three of them were mere juveniles.

Such atrocities seldom happen in Trumbull, Farmington, Woodbridge, and Middlebury, though Connecticut’s gun laws, among the country’s most restrictive, are the same throughout the state.

So the most compelling policy questions arising from these atrocities do not involve guns. No, clamor about guns is being used mainly to distract from the compelling questions: Who and what built and sustain the poverty factories and the destructive cultures they create? Why do the poverty factories and their destructive cultures correlate almost exactly with Democratic city administrations and Democratic poverty and education policies? And with tens if not hundreds of millions of handguns already in private hands throughout the country, how would the poverty factories and their cultures be changed in the least even if guns were outlawed?

Sanctuary murder

Another illegal charged with murder: Sanctuary state Connecticut has another murder on its hands because of government’s refusal to control illegal immigration. The first was the murder of Casey Chadwick in Norwich by an illegal alien from Haiti, Jean Jacques, who recently had been released from a Connecticut prison after serving a 17-year sentence for attempted murder but was not deported as he should have been. The new murder is that of Sabrina DaSilva in New Bedford, Mass., a crime charged to her father, Walter DaSilva, an illegal alien from Brazil who was living in Danbury and is said to have confessed. DaSilva has been deported twice already, the second time in 2012 after serving an eight-year prison term for attempted murder. The Danbury News-Times says federal officials don’t know how DaSilva got back into the country.

Danbury’s congresswoman, Elizabeth Esty, a Democrat, tries to place the atrocity in both her party’s gun control narrative and its immigration narrative. Esty says the immigration “system” is “broken.” But the “system” isn’t broken; its management is simply incompetent and deliberately kept that way.

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton explains it: Democrats want more illegal immigrants so the party will get more impoverished voters who become dependent on government, while Republicans want more illegal immigrants for cheap labor, and the losers are the native middle class.