HEALING FROM TRAGEDY
Two U.S. mass shootings in 2012 — Sandy Hook and Aurora, Colo. — were harbingers of what is now called an ‘odd new category’
Thousands of mourners hold vigil last night along the Danforth for victims of the Sunday night shooting.
In the aftermath of Sunday’s shooting rampage, police Chief Mark Saunders told the media there was a “newness” to the latest wave of violence in the city.
Some Canadians might like to think that mass shootings are the grim hallmark of U.S. society, but Toronto has become increasingly familiar with what one criminologist calls an “odd new category” in his field of study.
In April, a man drove a van into pedestrians along a stretch of Yonge St., killing 10 people and injuring 16 more. In May, there was the bombing of a Mississauga restaurant — still unsolved — that injured 15. In addition, this summer has brought a spike of shootings that have been increasingly brazen, including an incident when two sisters, 5 and 9, were injured at a Scarborough playground.
Gary LaFree, chair of the criminology and criminal justice department at the University of Maryland, noted that while violent crime rates in the U.S., Europe and Canada are at historic lows, “you’ve got school shooting and terrorism and all sorts of violence that is in this odd new category.”
“This is not like an old-fashioned homicide,” LaFree said, noting that while some perpetrators have motives, others do not: “It has been until recently pretty unusual where people just go out and shoot as many people as they can without any apparent motive like the Las Vegas case not too long ago.”
The Special Investigations Unit identified the suspect in Sunday’s shooting, which left two people dead and 13 injured, as Faisal Hussain, 29. The SIU said that after an exchange of gunfire with police, he fled the area and was found dead on Danforth Ave. Police sources told the Star he died of a selfinflicted gunshot wound, but the SIU has not confirmed that detail. While police are trying to determine what may have compelled the shooter to open fire on people in the bustling downtown neighbourhood, Hussain’s family pointed to severe mental illness.
Jooyoung Lee, an associate professor of sociology, recently finished teaching a summer course on mass shootings at the University of Toronto.
He is from the U.S. but has lived in Canada for six years, and has noticed that when mass shootings happen in the U.S. there is often a “brief moment” where Canadians morally distance themselves: “This is a tragedy, this is a disaster. I’m so glad that Canada is not like that,” they’ll say.
“But I think unfortunately these string of attacks and tragedies … have really changed that narrative to some extent and made Canadians, and Canadian policy-makers, take a closer look at some of the domestic issues that are also giving rise to these kinds of events,” he said.
Lee said Canada has many of the same “underlying structural conditions” that are a big part of the reason that shootings happen in the U.S.: “impoverished neighbourhoods; communities of colour that are marginalized from the key mainstream institutions that give people a leg up in the world; disparate access to higher education and opportunity in the labour market.”
Lee said that with mass killings generally, there can be “young men who are lonely and disaffected” about how life has turned out. “They may have a different range of mental health conditions that complicate those feelings,” he said.
Mayor John Tory has said the city has a gun problem and Lee noted that, although Toronto is statistically very safe, there has been a “pretty consistent uptick” in the Toronto police statistics for the number of shootings in Toronto, both fatal and non-fatal, since 2016.
James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University who has studied mass killing since the 1980s and written many books on the topic, defines a “mass killing” as an incident where four or more people are killed. He said that traditionally “mass shooting” referred to a mass killing with a firearm, but since 2012 and the creation of the crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker, some groups define a “mass shooting” as four or more people who were killed or injured at the same event, not including the shooter.
One of the problems in modern society is the decline in community connections; we often know more about mass killers than we do our own neighbours, he said. “In an earlier era when someone lost their job, got separated from their spouse, had a death in the family, the neighbours would come over with casseroles and consolation,” Fox said, noting that now many people who suffer catastrophic losses don’t have a support system.
Since he began studying the phenomenon, Fox says society has become more divided. “There are different groups vying for scarce resources; when you look at the (killings) motivated by hate, that is a growing issue in terms of society becoming more diverse.”
Fox says that while an increasing number of mass killings are motivated by hate — targeting a class of people, as opposed to specific individuals — these events aren’t happening more often in the U.S.
While some academics have cited the Columbine High School massacre of 1999 as a watershed moment, Fox notes mass shootings were for a time overshadowed by Sept. 11, when “America started focusing on a different kind of threat.” Fox sees 2012 as the true turning point for interest from the public and the academic world. That was the year of the Aurora, Colorado theatre shooting and Sandy Hook school shooting.
“I have a graph I’ve put together using Google Scholar of how many articles have been published by criminologists on mass shootings and I also include homicide as a control. Basically there is hardly anything about mass shooting until 2012, then they shot up in terms of articles and actually overtook homicide,” he said.
“This is not like an old-fashioned homicide.” GARY LAFREE CHAIR OF THE CRIMINOLOGY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND