By The Tablet Staff

NEW YORK — President Biden traveled to New York City Thursday at Mayor Eric Adams’ request to discuss ways to curb the rise in gun violence that has gripped the city this year, claiming an alarming number of lives of police officers as well as civilians.

Biden was accompanied on the visit by Attorney General Merrick Garland, and, in addition to Adams, was scheduled to meet with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and other elected officials. They were slated to tour Police Headquarters in lower Manhattan to view a meeting of top NYPD officials and representatives of other law enforcement agencies.

The schedule also called for Biden, Garland, Adams, Hochul and other officials to meet at a “crisis management center” in the Queensbridge neighborhood in Queens, which the mayor credited with doing “an amazing job in bringing down crime.

“We have a real problem with the flow guns to cities like New York,” said Adams, who stressed that he would ask the President to federally fund “a 9/11 response” to what he called “the terror of violence that’s playing out in American cities.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration announced plans this week to launch a crackdown on illegal gun trafficking along what has been dubbed the “Iron Pipeline,” running south to north along the East Coast. The plan also calls for a Department of Justice “National Ghost Gun Initiative” aimed at squelching the making of “ghost guns,” homemade firearms that lack the serial numbers that would be used to trace them.