WASHINGTON--White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday the shooting death of 18-year-old Janay McFarlane--whose sister attended President Barack Obama's speech in Chicago on Friday--where he talked about curbing gun deaths--was a reminder why Congress needs "to do everything we can to reduce gun violence."

I asked Carney at the briefing if the White House had reached out to the McFarlane family in the wake of the horrific shooting--especially since her sister was at at the Obama speech at the Hyde Park Academy on Friday--hours before her sister was gunned down.

"I don't have any communications to report to you, Lynn," Carney said. "This is another example, a tragic example, of a young life being taken away by the scourge of gun violence in this country, and is a reminder of why we need to act together here in Washington to do everything we can to reduce gun violence, to do it in a way that, as the president has insisted, respects our Second Amendment rights, but to take necessary action to reduce this scourge, because it is taking too many young lives in America."

The Sun-Times is reporting that charges against two men accused of killing McFarlane in the Lake County suburb of North Chicago could come Tuesday.

The McFarlane murder came in the wake of the Jan. 29 death of Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old shot to death in a park about a mile from the Obama family home in Kenwood. That murder became very personal for Obama and First Lady Michelle: Mrs. Obama attended her funeral in Chicago; her parents, Cleopatra and Nate were at the State of the Union speech in Washington last week and in the audience at Hyde Park Academy speech.