Grief and anger over Danforth shooting

Re Girl, 10, and woman, 18, killed in shooting rampage on Toronto's Danforth, July 23 In response to previous comments by city officials regarding the fact that our city is still numerically safer than other large urban cities, I would like to add a personal perspective.

The impact on a city’s citizens is not always measured by a statistical comparison of where we are situated in the gun violence numbers. The impact can be much deeper than that and can fundamentally change how a city sees itself. It is not a rational mathematical analysis, but is a trauma that can penetrate at a level beyond what one would expect.

When I lived in Montreal and we experienced the Montreal Polytechnique massacre, it was not just the number of victims that was so disturbing. It was their smiling faces from the newspapers the next day showing us who they were; it was the promise of who these women could have become; it was having to reconcile that a man took the lives of these total strangers in cold blood.

We did not even have cellphone footage like we do today, yet the memory of watching the news that night stays with with me still, all these years later.

We had the killer’s manifesto speaking to his hatred of women, and the knowledge that one person could so fundamentally affect the lives of the victims and their families.

Their loss — being that of young daughters, sisters and friends — was the loss of the city. We did not mourn them as a number. We mourned them for the loss of the future, robbed from each one of these women and indeed their city that day. Sara Albin, Toronto Our hearts are too heavy and our souls too tired tonight. Who did it is irrelevant. It is the victims — those who were shot, and those of us around them — who matter.

Will this finally be our Port Arthur, the massacre that changed Australia’s gun laws? Or must we continue along the path of our neighbours to the south and stand idly by as the bodies hit the floor? Alexander Burton-Vulovic, Toronto As a character in Shakepeare’s Othello says: “Mere prattle without practice.”

Talk is worthless and action is priceless. Pauline Bell, Brampton