In what once was a New York City seasonal rite, the first weekend of hot temperatures often led to spasms of violence resulting in double-digit homicides and even more injured by gunfire. The Wall Street Journal says that in recent years, headlines about “bloody” weekends had waned, until yesterday, after seven people were fatally shot and 19 more were wounded by gunfire from Friday to Sunday. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “The bottom line is, including this weekend, we had the lowest number of shootings [this year] that we had in a decade.” Through Sunday, 439 people have been shot–down from 615 in the same period in 2012. “Usually on the first hot night, people bust out,” said Walter Signorelli, a retired New York Police Department inspector now on the faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “One night of shootings sometimes led to another night of shootings because of retaliation.”