New York City hasn’t been as violent in recent years as many felt it to be. The city managed to do a pretty good job on clamping down on violence from the 70s and 80s and making the Big Apple one of the safest major cities in the nation.

That held for quite some time, despite insane leadership coming and going.

Unfortunately, it’s 2020 and all of that is going out the window. Now, New York has a real growing problem with violence. The recent murder of an Indiana college student illustrates that unfortunately well.

A young man visiting New York City was shot and killed outside an Airbnb in Brooklyn early Saturday morning.

Twenty-year-old Ethan Williams’ parents say he and his friends put their money together to visit New York City, specifically Brooklyn, a place they dreamed of seeing.

While they were here, they planned to record skateboarding videos.

Williams and his friends were sitting out on the stoop outside their rented Airbnb apartment in Bushwick around 2:30 a.m. when shots were fired, hitting the Indiana University student.

Blaine Cromley says he had known Williams for 10 years.

“We were smoking cigs, man. Like, I don’t know. My heart’s broke,” Cromley said.

…

Police say Williams tried running inside but was hit in the chest by at least one bullet.

He was taken to Wycoff Heights Medical Center, where he died.

None of Williams’ friends were hurt.

His parents told CBS2’s Cory James they cannot believe this happened to a young man who worked with their local officials for years to combat violence.

See, this is what I have a problem with.

If gangbangers or other criminals are just killing each other, I honestly don’t care. Filth taking out other filth isn’t something I’m going to lose any sleep over. The problem is that their violence doesn’t stay contained. They hurt innocent people all the time. Williams is hardly the first by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet it’s important to remember that despite all the laws on the books in New York City, nothing stopped this from happening. New York has laws on its books that would never fly at the federal level, laws that wouldn’t pass even a Democratic-majority Congress. Despite that, though, nothing has stopped the violence from escalating.

New York’s fortunes when it comes to violent crime has ebbed and flowed over the years, usually without any significant new gun control laws being enacted or repealed. In fact, while anti-gunners have pointed to NYC’s gun laws as evidence of gun control working–at least, they did before everything went to hell there–the truth is that New York tried other policies to address violence because they really couldn’t pass anymore gun control. Not without having the Supreme Court hammer them, anyway.

Ethan Williams isn’t the first innocent person to be killed in New York. He won’t be the last.

However, for all the talk of gun control as a way to address this, we need to remember that none of it saved Ethan Williams’ life. Maybe it’s time to try something else.