Baby killers

Davell Gardner could have cured cancer. Or maybe he wouldn’t have been known beyond his friends and family. But he never even got to have his second birthday. Late Sunday night at a Bed-Stuy cookout, in his stroller, he was shot to death by someone with a gun.

Will the obscene murder of a baby be enough to stop the terrible eruption of shootings in the city, up 54% over last year? The mindlessness of the gunplay seems to have an emphasis on play. As the Daily News chronicled Sunday in profiling victims from the Fourth of July weekend, these weren’t robberies gone askew.

Are bad guys using freedom after months of virus lockdown to settle scores? Do they think that the absence of grand juries means that there can’t be felony indictments? They’re wrong.

If we misdiagnose the disease, we have no hope of treating it.

Forget Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s inane explanation that, “They feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry.” This isn’t “Les Misérables.” Robberies are down and Mayor de Blasio, providing free nutritious food daily, has handed out 84 million meals.

Sure, economic pain can fuel violence. No, bad guys aren’t decent dads trying to make ends meet.

Are we paying a price for the decision to disband the NYPD’s gun-hunting anticrime unit? We know at least that an antiviolence message is being drowned out by gunfire, by the cries of victims and by the nonsense of people blaming all the wrong things.