Raise the Age claims another victim, shot dead on a Bronx bus

New York’s perverse 2018 “Raise the Age” law empowered teens to carry guns and behave like thugs, safe in the knowledge that the courts would treat even vicious criminals as wayward children.

That culture of impunity surely shaped the thinking of the 15-year-old suspect in Monday’s midafternoon murder on a Bronx bus.

Why not carry a loaded gun on the bus, after all, when the worst that can happen is a brief visit to Family Court, on the vanishingly slim chance that you get stopped-and-frisked by a cop?

Normally, a dad of seven riding to pick up his little girl from school should be able to tell a noisy teen to pipe down without getting shot and killed.

But Jonathan Pettigrew, 41, thought he lived in a sane society, where a kid yelling into his cell phone heeds an adult, or at the very worst flips him the bird and makes some choice insults.

Not whip out a gun and kill him.

Raise the Age created a new category of offender for 16- and 17-year-olds to keep their cases in Family Court by default, except in extraordinary circumstances of serious violence.

This also lowered the leniency bar for younger wrongdoers, so 15-year-old criminals — even murderers — can get sentenced as “juvenile offenders.”

So while a teen murderer can technically face a life sentence, in practice he’ll serve five years at most.

Roughly 60% of juvenile offenders serve less than 45 days in jail.

Criminal gangs pay attention: They dramatically upped recruitment of kids as soon as Gov. Andrew Cuomo singed this idiocy into law; a whole generation’s now being seduced into a life of crime.

Raise the Age was enacted to protect older teens from the consequences of their crimes, on the assumption that their brains weren’t sufficiently developed to understand right and wrong.

But they can at least understand “allowed” and “not allowed,” and this law tells them they have no need at all to limit their worst impulses; Jonathan Pettigrew is only its lat​est victim​, not its last.