To solve gun violence, we can’t keep having the same debate
Gun violence making headlines in Toronto. Another young person dead in tragic circumstance. And sadly, I can’t shake a feeling of déjà vu.
On Nov. 7, I received an email about the shooting of 12-year-old Dante Andreatta from a community minister in Jane and
Finch. For me, the email triggered sadness, anger and momentary hopelessness. The same emotions I had felt as executive director of the CEE Centre for Young Black Professionals, receiving calls when one of our members had passed away due to gun violence. The same feelings I had living in England in 2008 when my sister called me to tell me a youth I had mentored had been arrested for murder. The same feelings that kept coming up in 2005, the “Year of the Gun,” when it seemed stories like this were happening every day, feelings which motivated me to launch a citywide campaign around solutions to gun violence.
The truth is, I’ve now spent almost half of my life working on issues connected to gun violence and participating in conversations on how we solve this issue. And what’s frustrating is how little has changed since 2005, both the realities on the ground and our inability to have nuanced public discussions on how we end gun violence.
Gun violence is a complex issue, more a symptom of larger sicknesses than an ailment in itself. It’s a topic that is emotionally charged, which defies our attempts to provide simple solutions. To truly engage with the issue takes moral courage, as gun violence challenges many of our deeply held assumptions about individuals and our society.
Because it’s uncomfortable to talk about, we’re fine to forget the issue when shootings aren’t setting records. For this reason, I have so much respect for activists like the Zero Gun Violence Movement’s Louis March or Aisha Francis of FIBI (Families Impacted By Incarceration), community champions who speak about this issue year in and year out.
But here we are again, another set of tragic, high-profile murders forcing us to have a public conversation. And one of the first places I get this feeling of déjà vu is from our social and political commentators. Who, almost like clockwork, are picking up preset ideological narratives, digging in as gun violence becomes another battlefield in our culture wars. Yet, gun violence’s complexity defies neat ideological boxes.
Today, as in 2005, conservative commentators want to focus on individual responsibility, moralizing and condemning those involved in gun violence as thugs and gangsters. Yet, while this provides neat and tidy talking points, it has glaring blind spots. People talk up the role of hip-hop culture in promoting violence, yet remain silent on the impact on young people of a mainstream consumer culture that tells them their true value is their ability to make and spend money.
Pundits focus on individual responsibility alone, when the evidence across time and space is pretty consistent about gangs and violence: it overwhelming involves young people, primarily young men, from poor communities and backgrounds that tend to be socially marginalized. Clearly, environmental factors matter, this isn’t just about morally compromised young adults making bad life choices.
Now I’m a progressive myself, but the truth is gun violence also can create issues for progressive narratives. It’s difficult to engage with an issue that involves truly awful acts being committed primarily by members of marginalized communities against other members of their own communities.
And gun violence complicates current critiques of policing, as the reality is many residents in affected neighbourhoods feel genuinely afraid by what’s happening. And some do advocate for more officers to be present, quicker police response times and increased surveillance measures.
The reality is that grappling with gun violence demands less adherence to our philosophical positions. When we’re focused on winning a debate, we often leave out facts that are inconvenient to our narratives and try just to outsmart the other side, which rarely helps in finding solutions.
But the general public doesn’t do any better in engaging with
this issue. Gun violence only becomes an issue of public concern when it spills out of inner-suburban neighbourhoods into the downtown of Toronto, or we get incidents that are so tragic we just can’t ignore them.
But when gun violence does lead the news cycle, we typically take the most superficial engagement possible, framing it as an issue about gang members, rivalries around turf and the cycles of retaliation that typically drive individual shootings.
But the fact is gang violence is the tip of the iceberg here. Street-level gangs and the brazen crimes they commit are the visible manifestations of a much larger illegal economy that exists in our society, primarily a drug trade that in Canada is worth billions of dollars. Rarely do we talk about gun violence in this context or as a consequence of a war on drugs we have been waging for generations.
Most of the young people firing guns on our streets are the front-line workers in the international drug economy, they operate in a pyramid structure where they sit at the bottom, as the pawns. A famous study from Chicago found most young gang members made no more than minimum wage workers at McDonalds.
Above the street gangs are local organized crime groups and then transnational criminal networks. As reporter Peter Edwards wrote in this paper, many organized crime groups in Toronto have street gangs that directly operate as proxies for them in their larger struggles. Even if the relationship isn’t that direct, the reality is handguns are not manufac
tured in Jane and Finch; the raw components for heroin or cocaine are not harvested in Regent Park.
Guns and drugs, the fuel for much of the violence in our streets, comes to our city via transnational illicit supply chains. All over the world, the illegal drug economy creates an insatiable demand for workers at the street level, and in almost every society this is filled by whatever cultural groups are at the bottom of the social hierarchy and suffering from the most marginalization. As long as Canadian society has communities that face chronic underemployment, poverty and social isolation, there will be a steady supply of young people to meet the demand the prohibition of drugs creates for foot soldiers.
Last week, we learned about the New Money So Sick Gang raids in Peel region, with guns, 1.4 million in cash and 1.9 million dollars of drugs put on display. Ask yourself, who was buying those drugs and providing the revenue to purchase those 34 confiscated firearms? It was everyday GTA residents who buy illegal drugs. Now let’s think about all that money that flows below the surface here. Billions of dollars in drugs can’t move through our society without some level of corruption taking place within government and law enforcement. Nor can all this money get “cleaned” without engaging folks in the financial industry, real estate and in business — “snow washing” is the term experts use for laundering money in Canada.
In Vancouver, studies have shown how dirty money has infiltrated their gaming industry and driven real estate costs up. What role has money
laundering played in impacting Toronto real estate prices? These are conversations we don’t like to have, we don’t like to peer under the water at the iceberg, instead we compartmentalize gun violence as something totally disconnected from the lives of “respectable citizens,” not financed by the bag of cocaine our friend brought to a work party.
Finally, just like commentators and the general public, our politicians struggle to get it right on this issue. When the body count breaks records, leaders suddenly rediscover the Roots of Youth Violence Report, the Toronto Youth Equity Strategy and all the funding requests for youth workers and youth spaces that have been ignored over the years. The most damning reality about gun violence in Toronto is the fact that despite all the promises and commitments made in 2005, the material conditions in our most vulnerable neighbourhoods have not improved.
Despite the warnings from community activists, academics and young people themselves, we chose to keep taxes low over taking real action. Despite the rhetoric around wanting to support vulnerable youth, our investments suggest our leaders were just fine with a status quo, policing-first, response. Sadly, because gun violence is not typically seen as an issue that speaks to the concerns of “middle-class Canadians,” it’s ignored. Until it can’t be. Then we get shortterm splashes of cash that dry up in a few years.
So where do we go from here? I’m beseeching us as a city to learn from our past. To not get stuck on winning left vs. right debates on who understands
the issue better, but to focus on trying to find viable solutions. Decisive action needs all three levels of government involved, and rarely do we find all three levels of government on the same ideological page in Canada. If we want real action, we will need to agree on policies that can garner support from different political persuasions.
When it comes to our society, we need to stop thinking of gun violence as something that happens only in certain neighbourhoods and just involves wayward youth, we must face our collective culpability as a society. Oregon and Vancouver are moving forward with policies around decriminalizing drugs, Portugal did it in 2001 and had reductions in violence and overdoses as a result.
I’m not naive enough to say if all drugs were legalized gangs would cease to exist, but evaluating our current prohibition regime around drugs is a conversation worth having. So are larger conversations about how we combat organized crime, and the smuggling of weapons and drugs into our country.
Further, we’ve got to demand our politicians take this issue seriously and realize it’s more than a debate between building more prison cells or youth centres. We need a multidecade strategy, with specific interventions that reduce violence now and long-term solutions that close the gaps between neighbourhoods. We’ve lost far too many lives, spent far too many years rehashing the same old debates and left too many action plans unfunded and unrealized. My hope, my prayer for this city, is that maybe this time we can do things differently.