Two young men were shot and killed overnight in New York City, in Brooklyn and the Bronx, the latest episodes of gun violence in a city coping with a surge in crime.
Just before 9 p.m. Saturday, cops were called to the 1200 block of Virginia Avenue in the Bronx, where they discovered a man in his 20s with a gunshot to the head. He was taken to Jacobi Medical Center and pronounced dead. Police recovered a gun at the scene.
About five hours later, cops learned a man had been brought privately to Woodhull Hospital with a fatal gunshot to the chest. They later determined the 18-year-old had been sitting in a parked car in the 700 block of Greene Avenue when he was shot.
The city's murder rate has been its only bright spot this year, falling 15% in January versus a year earlier (28 murders versus 33). But all other categories of crime are sharply higher, and shooting incidents of all kinds are up 32%.
Mayor Eric Adams, a former cop himself, is pushing a multi-pronged approach to end gun violence, and President Joe Biden was in the city this week to meet with Adams and push for a combined local-federal approach to the problem of gun trafficking.
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