All progressive bad choices collide with teen migrant shoplifting gunman

New York had a sanctuary-city payday Thursday evening, when a shoplifting, pistol-packing 15-year-old “migrant” allegedly opened fire in a Times Square store — wounding a tourist before bolting into a crowded street, squeezing off a few more rounds and disappearing into a subway station.

Really — does it get more out of control than that?

More terrifying?

More thoroughly predictable?

All that was missing was an OD’ed junkie with a needle in his arm — and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg off in a corner mumbling about the incarceration state.

Oh, sure, the big fellow finally got around to indicting the migrant mini-mob that kicked two cops around Times Square last month.

Good luck with convictions, though.

All seven suspects are MIA at the moment — after Bragg’s socially sensitive assistant prosecutors declined to request bail for the four who actually were arrested.

Cause and effect is murky stuff, for sure. But when people who beat up cops are walked through the door — and into the wind — as a matter of routine, why would a mere shoplifter fear consequences?

Obviously Thursday’s merchandise booster — tentatively identified by police as Venezuelan Jesus Rives-Figuero, 15, a suspect in a Bronx robbery — wasn’t concerned: He was carrying a gun — and suddenly the cost of Bragg’s restorative-justice regime sharply escalated.

That it wasn’t a fatal escalation was not for lack of trying; whether it signals a trend — are illegal immigrants now arming themselves? — will become more clear time passes.

And not much time.

Meanwhile, Thursday’s outburst was a four-fecta of urban disorder:

* There was the migrant overload — a debilitating burden on the city both physically and fiscally;

* There was the shooting — a sanguinary phenomenon traceable directly to Gotham’s abandonment of broken-windows policing;

* There was the shoplifting — a post-pandemic plague that is driving retailers to distraction and, in many cases, out of business altogether, and;

* There was the heavy hit to Broadway and the tourism trade in general — critical both to the city’s economy and to its already-shrunken tax base.

(It’s not hard to imagine how the wounded tourist’s Big Apple Yelp review will read.)

The migrant mess is Washington-centric, of course — even if the city’s virtually all-Democrat congressional delegation seems content with it.

All the rest is on New York’s uber-progressive political culture, the policies it produces and the politicians it elects.

Exhibit A is Bragg: Put a nickel in his ear and he begins to burble about criminal-justice “equity.”

Elect him DA, and he immediately announces his intent to avoid incarceration for anything short of murder and rape. (And, one suspects, not always then.)

Not to haul out an old chestnut, but elections do have consequences — in this case, Thursday’s violent Times Square mashup, most of what has happened since Mike Bloomberg left office and all that’s lurking down the road.

Gov. Hochul could kick Bragg to the curb, but she won’t even challenge the Legislature to get serious about crime.

Now all honest New Yorkers can do is hunker down and wait for summer.

It should be a hot one.

Email: bob@bobmcmanus.nyc