National Post (National Edition)
Toronto's `unacceptable' gang problem
Toronto is having a wretched year. Shootings and killings are at near-record levels. They are open and brazen.
The most recent, and surely one of the saddest, saw a 12-year-old boy being shot during some murderous gang-related idiocy. Of course the police, as they must until absolute proof comes in, have been careful to say that it is not “definitive” that it was “gang-related.”
Here was the situation: There were two vehicles in a parking lot. From the first one, two occupants got out and began shooting at five people in the second.
Other than gang-related — say Mormons fighting over first-dibs at door-knocking rights, or down-at-heel carpet salesmen struggling for the first crack at a potential customer — what is a more plausible speculation than one bunch of thugs visiting their high-velocity rage on another?
The 12-year-old was with his mother. She wasn't shot, but as her husband, in all his anguish, noted, his wife saw the boy lying on the ground after being shot. Some things are probably more damaging than a bullet. This is likely one of those things.
Mother and child, be it noted, were engaging in one of Toronto's more dangerous undertakings: shopping.
Police found 30 bullet casings at the scene, with a number of slugs entering nearby homes, including that of a teenage girl who had the privilege of a bullet whizzing through her bedroom wall. Her father, I am sure, along with his daughter, is still shaking.
It should also be noted that the shooting of the 12-year-old boy, and the unthinkable shock of his mother watching him fall to the sidewalk, did not take place in the mad darkness of the post-midnight hours. This wasn't some after-hours, drug-fuelled fracas.
It was in broad daylight. Toronto's thugs have given up their vampire schedules — dawn is no longer a problem, or the hours thereafter. Morning or afternoon, in the sweet autumn sunlight, is just as likely a time for a hit in 2020 as the deep night used to be in the old days when gangsters waited till everyone was asleep before spraying their colleagues with bullets.
Shootings in Toronto haven't quite reached the level of Chicago, where every weekend seems like a scheduled slaughter. But they are up to 425 and they are concentrated in specific areas of the city.
And for all the endless reiteration of the phrase “gun violence” — an utterly empty, mechanical, agencyfree designation — the only term that honestly describes what is going on is “gang violence.” The gangs are a mean, reckless bunch, untroubled by the mayhem they visit on children and their mothers.
Guns do not pull their own triggers. Guns are inert unless some person picks one up, loads it, tucks it into his pants and finally fires into a crowd of people with wanton disregard for human life. This is not gun violence. It is gang violence. It is both desperate and cowardly to attribute the violence to guns rather than gangs.
After this latest horror, Toronto Mayor John Tory declared that it was “totally unacceptable.” What in heaven's name does he mean by
IT IS BOTH DESPERATE
AND COWARDLY TO
ATTRIBUTE THE VIOLENCE
TO GUNS RATHER THAN
GANGS.
that? What does “unacceptable” possibly mean in this instance? Were any of the previous murders thought by anyone to be “acceptable?”
The mayor is saying nothing. When you've hit 425 shootings in a city that's almost always described as safe, you are long past unacceptable. I think that the mother and her son already knew that and did not need the vaporous reminder from the city's chief magistrate.
What might really help is a new, visible determination, with fresh aggressive policies behind it, to rein in the gangs and give some peace to the most troubled areas of Toronto.
It's hard to say there's any good news in a story like this one, but that the much-beleaguered Toronto Police Service arrested two suspects within days is certainly grimly welcome.