‘Cowardly act of violence’
Toronto mayor rails against guns problems
The Danforth rampage is more horrific evidence of Toronto’s gun problem, the city’s mayor said Monday. But would tighter gun laws have stopped the alleged shooter, a man “with a face full of hate,” as witnesses described him, and who zigzagged across the Danforth, firing and reloading?
In a speech in Toronto city council chambers less than 12 hours after Sunday’s shooting spree, Mayor John Tory called the Greektown tragedy an “unspeakable” and “cowardly act of violence” in a city plagued by a recent string of brazen shootings.
“I’ve said for some time that this city has a gun problem in that guns are too readily available to far too many people,” Tory said. “There are far too many people carrying around guns in our city and our region who should not have them.”
“Why,” he added, “does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?”
Tougher gun laws wouldn’t entirely eliminate tragedies like the Danforth shooting, said Tory. “But even if we can prevent one of these incidents it is a discussion worth having, and having very soon.”
Yet Bill C-71, the Liberal firearm bill, contains mostly tweaks to Canada’s gun laws, not a major overhaul. It expands background checks to a person’s life history (rather than just the past five years), requires gun retailers to keep records of inventory and sales and mandates anyone selling a gun to verify that the purchaser has a valid possession licence.
However, it doesn’t ban assault rifles like the one carried by Quebec City mosque shooter Alexandre Bissonnette, who pleaded guilty in March to six charges of firstdegree murder and six of attempted murder.
When Bissonnette’s rifle jammed he switched to a handgun.
If even a small mercy can be found in Sunday’s rampage on the Danforth it is that the shooter did not use an even more lethal weapon, experts said. “This guy had a handgun, and not an assault weapon,” said University of Alabama professor of criminology Adam Lankford.
Nikolas Cruz, the former student who killed 17 people and wounded 14 at a Parkland, Fla., high school in February, used a military style AR-15 semi-automatic weapon.
The same type of rifle was used in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn. in 2013 that left 20 children and eight adults killed.
Among other amendments to the Liberal gun bill, the Coalition for Gun Control wants licensing criteria to be toughened to reduce the chances a gun owner “is a threat to themselves or others.”
The five worst public shootings in U.S. history have all occurred since 2007, and in many cases there were serious red flags. In the Parkland shooting, “there were people calling the FBI saying the kid was going to do something like this,” Lankford said. Months before the shooting, a YouTube user with the screen name “Nikolas Cruz” wrote “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”
The majority of mass and active shooters in the U.S. acquired their guns legally and “over the counter” by purchasing them at gun stores or shops, Lankford said. “In the rare cases where guns are obtained by mass shooters illegally, it’s often because the guns are stolen from family members.” The Sandy Hook shooter stole his rifle from his mother’s cache, killing her before driving to the school.”
Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control said the research is “pretty unassailable: if you reduce access to guns you reduce the chances that people will kill themselves or others.”
The U.K., which banned handguns after the Dunblane school massacre in 1996, when Thomas Hamilton shot 16 children and one teacher dead before killing himself, had 27 gun murders last year.
Australia has seen a similar reduction, “and Canada was heading in the right direction until we saw the relaxation of our gun laws” under the Conservative government, Cukier said.