THIS is the real problem with our country

Always at this time of year, after Memorial Day, you hear that summer has begun, that there has already been a change of seasons even though the calendar says summer doesn’t start for three more weeks. But the reality in America, in a country where there is always another gun going off, is that the shooting season never ends. It just seems to get going a lot better in summer.

The big headline of the weekend is about how police shootings are up in America over the past few years. And those numbers are troubling, especially when you factor in how many shootings involved unarmed victims, so many of the victims people of color. By now the whole world knows about famous shootings like that in Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., and in Cleveland, and that is just the short list.

But it is just one part of the story, in tough neighborhoods that too often become killing fields and shooting galleries. More than anything the issue is guns, in a country that must look to the rest of the world like a Wild West country of guns, even as most major politicians — Michael Bloomberg is always the notable exception — run away from the subject as if somebody has pulled a gun on them.

We are still talking about the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in police custody. Only now there are 40 homicides in a month in that city, most of them shooting deaths, and you wonder where the days and nights of protest and outrage are about that across the rest of the country.

And the other night in Washington, a 28-year old reporter named Charnice Milton was shot to death in the southeast part of that city while waiting for a bus after finishing her work for the day for Capital Community News.

A guy comes by on a dirt bike, a guy with a gun, aiming at somebody else, but Charnice Milton, a young woman with a master’s degree from Syracuse University, with big ideas about being a famous reporter in the nation’s capital, is the one who is hit, and then gone.

When it is over, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier, said this:

“Unfortunately, wrong place, wrong time.”

It is as much a definition of a country of guns right now as anything else: The wrong place in America is a bus stop where a young woman with everything ahead of her is waiting for a bus to take her home from work. One more time, on one of the streets that the police of this country so often try to police in vain, the wrong place at the wrong time turned out to be anywhere.

So it is all these deaths in Baltimore right now. It is Washington, the city where politicians do nothing about guns, who only talk about gun control, and that includes the President of the United States.

Last week there were five other deaths besides Charnice Milton’s in six days in Washington, one involving the shooting of the driver of a car during the morning rush hour on the Anacostia Freeway. And shooting deaths are up in New York, year to year, but somehow that fact of life in the city is treated like some statistical blip, and no one is supposed to worry, as if things won’t get worse across the summer.

You wonder if any of the men or women running for President this time, the ones who want to yell about Wall Street and the middle class, will have the courage to stand up and talk about guns in America in this campaign. Or if they think that “wrong place, wrong time” explains all of the senseless bloodshed and death away, just because so many politicians, starting with the Republicans running for President, live in fear of the goons of the National Rifle Association coming after them.

Sometimes the wrong place and wrong time is the Walnut St. apartment in Yonkers, where Mikalyla Manners (l.) picked up a semiautomatic handgun that happened to be lying around her home and shot herself in the face. She lasted a few days after that but is dead now at the age of 4, dead because that gun was available, a kind of gun that should never be in anyone’s home, unless somebody in Yonkers was thinking about invading White Plains.

You still want to make this about overzealous, trigger-happy cops in this country, go ahead. You’re watching the wrong movie. A good, old-fashioned, shoot-’em-up movie is playing in apartments and on streetcorners, at bus stops and outside bars, all over America.

Saturday morning it was the Hollywood Lodge, Coolidge Ave., North Amityville, L.I. There’s a fight outside the bar, there’s a gun, one of three brothers ends up dead.

Cops aren’t killing this country, income inequality isn’t killing it, race won’t kill it, no matter how hard race always tries. Wall Street isn’t killing this country. Guns are.