Sometimes a city experiences a crime that changes its self-perception. There was a murder on the Upper East Side last night that may just do that for New York City.

At 8:30 on a bright summer evening near the corner of Lexington Ave. and 95th street, a 20-year-old woman pushing her three-month-old child in a baby stroller was shot in the head by a hooded assailant. The news reports say the baby was “unharmed” — a word that conveys that the child wasn’t injured but somehow reinforces the grievous harm that will shadow the child’s life. Police are investigating it as a domestic incident (the victim and the shooter are believed to have known each other).

But across social media this morning, we’re seeing recriminations about last week’s ruling on New York’s laws governing concealed carry.

I’m afraid that these are entirely unlinked. I would bet everything I owned that the assailant was entirely untouched by this ruling and the laws that it affected. New York County (that’s Manhattan), has allowed only about 400 people to even have concealed-carry permits. The assailant’s gun will not be listed on a single New York pistol permit. Not a single one of New York County’s CCW permits have yet been altered from a restrictive “sportsman” regulation to a full-carry one in light of the ruling in Bruen. If anyone expected that one of these permit carriers was the assailant, police could just go down the handy list they have for suspects, probably skipping over the celebrities and the mayor himself. The Supreme Court ruling has no effect whatsoever on New York’s pistol-license requirement and background checks.

And so this instinct to blame Clarence Thomas reflects a broader mismatch in the progressive approach to gun control. You could see it in questioning of Governor Kathy Hochul yesterday before the shooting.

The same mismatch informed Mayor Eric Adams’s initial response to the killing yesterday, in which he cited his participation in a panel on the problem of ghost guns. Heaping up more legal burdens, fees, and class requirements on New Yorkers will have almost no effect on gun homicides.

Almost all gun crimes in New York are committed by people who did not purchase their firearms legally. Even if they don’t have a previous record, they are usually uncomfortable submitting themselves to any examination by law enforcement, and are disinclined to go around searching for the character references one needs to qualify for purchasing, let alone carrying, a gun in New York State. And felons who could not pass a background check do not submit themselves to one. Criminals are not interested in gunsmithing the way ghost-gun enthusiasts would be. The gun isn’t a hobby for them, but a tool used in a criminal enterprise.

The only form of gun control that intersects with the type of crime we saw in New York yesterday is the vigorous enforcement of laws against criminal possession of guns, and criminal carry of guns — in other words, stop and frisk. Progressives oppose this form of gun control because they believe it is racist. They want to enforce gun control at the gun shops near the Finger Lakes, not on the trigger men in New York City.