An 11-year-old was shot and killed on Jan. 16 while buying a gallon of milk in Syracuse, N.Y. Brexialee Torres-Ortiz, the Blodgett Middle School class president, was caught in the crossfire of a suspected gang-related shooting in a disturbing trend that the city’s mayor called "senseless" and "brutal."

In 2022, nearly 150 shooting victims younger than 18 died in New York City, which is about a 100% increase over a five-year period, New York Police Department data showed. Now, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm over the lack of criminal justice reform.

Torres-Ortiz’s tragic killing is "not unusual in New York State," and a "failure on so many levels," Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., tells Fox Digital. Tenney said she has also been a victim of crime while living in the area. 

"My car was broken into, my neighbor's house was broken into. My other neighbor had her car broken into," said Tenney, who adds that crime "came up everywhere" on the 2022 midterm campaign trail, with New Yorkers telling her stories about "a break in, an act of violence, somebody with a knife, somebody with an illegal gun."

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The murder occurred just days after Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul introduced a public safety plan allocating $36 million to the Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) Initiative and $40 million to aid prosecution efforts at state district attorney’s offices.

After New York’s crime wave dominated the 2022 midterm cycle — and flipped several seats in the GOP’s favor — the state's leaders in Albany are now answering the voters’ calls to tighten up bail laws and fund police departments. But it might not be the approach that the Republican delegation can get on aboard with. 

The problem lies with the aftermath of the state’s 2020 cashless bail law, which Republicans say allowed for a "revolving door" of repeat offenders to be cycled on and off the street. 

"We have these new laws in Albany that are just a few years old that are just spiking our crime because people aren't held accountable anymore," said Tenney. 

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In response, the entire New York Republican delegation sponsored the SERVE Our Communities Act, which would provide incentives for the state to hold repeat offenders accountable, including a $10 million anti-recidivism grant from the Department of Justice. 

Tenney says that judges in New York "are not able to determine the dangerous standard," which allows judges to hold people in jail who they believe will commit crimes if released. 

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"That dangerous standard was brought down to Albany in a special section session rejected by the Democrats and rejected by Kathy Hochul," said Tenney. 

In her 2023 "Achieving the New York Dream" plan, Hochul defended the cashless bail policy, saying that "data from before and after the enactment of bail reform actually shows that eliminating the "least restrictive" standard for bail-eligible offenses — while retaining it for less serious crimes — will not increase the overall rate of pretrial incarceration. Of course, we also must understand that changing our bail law will not automatically bring down crime."

Hochul's office did not respond to Fox News' request for comment. However, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and former police officer, recently said that Manhattan will be leaving crime behind in 2022, saying it's "trending downward" in a Jan. 5 press conference. 

But the numbers paint a different picture: year-to-date data shows that shootings in New York City spiked 19% from this time last year.

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More than 200 New Yorkers died last year to gun violence, according to a report from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. Gun violence deaths also skyrocketed by 31 percent over the past five years.

"This is happening around the country," said Tenney, who believes that New York’s crime wave is emblematic of a national trend in progressive-run cities.

Under Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s leadership, total crime in Chicago rose by 41% in 2022, city data show, while in Los Angeles, murders rose by 12% from 2020-2022 under Mayor Eric Garcetti’s tenure. 

Author Rollo Tomassi talked to Dr. Phil on Friday about how an entire generation of young men or "lost boys" are neglected and demonized for being males.

Dr. Phil's recent episode titled "The Demise of Guys" discussed how young men in America are facing an existential crisis of what it means to be a man, with many seeking masculine self-help gurus online. Debate raged over what constitutes "toxic masculinity" and what qualifies as demonizing masculinity itself.

Dr. Phil asked Tomassi about past statements, "What do you mean when you say media celebrates masculinity as equally acting feminine?"

"That’s the only time that the mainstream media will ever celebrate masculinity is when you see The Rock in a tutu," Tomassi responded. "Whenever you see men behaving conventionally feminine, that’s when the media decides to celebrate them. But yet when a guy is acting in a conventionally masculine way, we do not celebrate that, they find some way to demonize that."

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Dr. Phil introduced Tomassi as the "godfather of the Manosphere," the Manosphere being a decentralized online community of men over two decades who, as Tomassi described, "compare notes" about how to improve in physical training, financial success and social skills.

Tomassi noted, "We have a generation of what we call ‘lost boys’ right now who don’t have a father figure, they don’t have any guidance-whether its masculinity or much else for that matter."

The author added further that men are "sedated" by society via escapism through alcohol, pornography, and video games because their lives are so miserable. 

Dr. Phil asked about the suicide rate of men compared to women being 3.5-5 times larger.

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Tomassi responded that "deaths of despair" have become more common because society has so few mechanisms or institutions that are looking out for the welfare of men as a distinct group. 

"We constantly harp on the fact that men don’t have friends, don’t have close friends, don’t have the same networks that women do, and then we put the blame for their mental health back on them by saying ‘its toxic masculinity and if you guys were just more like women, then you would reach out for therapy of some sort,'" he said.

He illustrated how society would be radically different if women were encountering these issues. 

"If women were killing themselves at 4 times the rate that men are, you would have a dedicated month and the NFL would change their uniforms to pink or something else so that we would have some sort of female suicide prevention month, but we don’t see that right now, because we blame it on toxic masculinity," he said.