As my Canadian readers probably already know, there was another shooting incident in Toronto last night. It was a particularly bad one, leaving two dead, nineteen wounded and two injured. It comes just six weeks after the dramatic June 2 shooting at the Eaton Centre that killed two, wounded six and injured one.
Since everybody is currently freaking out and losing all sense of perspective, one thing jumped out at me from the CBC report of the Scarborough shooting last night. "Prior to the shooting on Monday evening, 16 people had been killed in gun-related homicides on the streets of Toronto since January 1, compared to 14 people at the same time last year."
Simply put, we're at about the same place we were last year so far as gun deaths go. It's also noteworthy just how few people are killed by guns in a city of this size. Toronto still has a remarkably low homicide rate. The events are undeniably becoming more spectacular and brazen, but they're also comparatively rare.
Let's compare and contrast for a moment. Toronto, a city of 2,615,060 people, has seen 28 meet a violent end so far this year. Chicago, home of 2,695,598 souls, has had 228 murdered as of June 16. 27 people in Chicago have been stabbed to death this year, equal to Toronto's entire homicide rate. The North American city closest to Toronto in size has a murder rate nearly ten times ours.
Here's an even better perspective.
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6).Aside from a spike in 2005, Toronto's murder rate has been falling since 1991, when it was still only 89 deaths. I'm not sure that Toronto could possibly be safer than it already is.
I addressed this all after the Boxing Day, 2005 murder of poor Jane Creba, but it does bear repeating. God knows that you won't hear it anywhere else.
You would think that those statistics would chill everybody the fuck out. However, we have a media that makes money out of fear, a political class that exploits that fear, and a population that just likes being scared.
I can't really blame journalism - and especially the local news - for it's sleazy "If it bleeds, it leads" ethos. They wouldn't do it if we didn't buy it. That's how capitalism works. People want their own stupidity reinforced as often and as powerfully as possible. It's self-defeating and sad, but what are you going to do?
The political class, however, is something else entirely. They're supposed to know better than the rest of us, and they do. But they consciously exploit our own scared stupidity to further their own retarded agendas. And the agendas on both the Left and the Right are nothing short of monumentally retarded.
Let's start with the Left. We have this guy on City Council named Adam Vaughan. After the Eaton Centre shooting, young Adam got it into his head that banning guns and ammunition would solve all of our social ills, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence to sustain his assertion.
First, the city doesn't have jurisdiction. Gun laws fall under the Criminal Code of Canada. Even if Vaughan's silly "ban" were to pass, who would police it? Who would prosecute infractions? Where would you jail offenders? And who in the fuck would pay for all of the above?
Second, the "hunters" that everybody on both sides of the argument refer to aren't the issue either way. Nobody who knows what they're doing goes hunting with a handgun. And the use of rifles and shotguns in Toronto crimes is incredibly rare. It happens, but not a lot.
Handguns are already tightly regulated in Canada. The most anti-gun jurisdictions in the United States look like they're giving guns away, compared to Canada.
Third, even if you were able to institute a Western European-style ban on handguns, our proximity to the United States would make it meaningless. The Second Amendment to the U.S Constitution, combined with the open border, guarantees that those guns will wind up in our cities. Period.
Mexico has even stronger gun control laws than Canada does. Ask how it's working out for them. Partisan Republican shitheads like to harp about the 600-odd Fast and Furious guns that killed two U.S agents and about 300 Mexicans. But they don't like talking about where the guns that killed the other 47,000 Mexicans since 2006 came from.
As long as the United States - which has as many guns as it does people - continues to exist, gun control laws in Canada and Mexico will be effectively meaningless. The U.S itself has all kinds of laws barring felons from being armed. Notice how well they've worked?
Finally, liberals simply aren't serious. As much as they scream about banning guns, they don't seem all that excited about punishing those who use them in crimes. Most Canadian liberals couldn't be more opposed to the Harper government's recent crime bill that imposed mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes.
I'm of the mind that the Conservative gun sentences aren't tough enough. Were it up to me, if you use a gun in the commission of a crime, you go away for life with no possibility of parole for twenty years, regardless of whether anyone gets hurt or if the gun isn't even fired. If you pull a piece on somebody, I can only conclude that you intend to kill them and figure that you should be treated accordingly. The fact that you're either a bad shot or a pussy shouldn't work in your favour. I would also amend the Criminal Code to prosecute attempted murder under the same sentencing guidelines as murder itself.
The conservative side of the debate is every bit as ridiculous and stoically unserious as the liberals are.
In one of the few things that he's ever been even half-right about, my dipshit of a mayor said “It’s not the hunters, these are gangs. I wish we could get the guns out of the city with respect to these gangs. It is going to be very difficult, but you don’t take it out on hunters and the sportsman show.” Federal Public Safety Minister and celebrated babysitter fetishist Vic Toews backed Ford up, remarking that “The issue isn’t the legality or illegality of bullets or guns. The issue is these guns in the hands of criminals. That needs to be stopped. Our focus has been on focusing on those individuals who in fact are breaking the law.”
They're right. Guns aren't the problem, gangs are. What they ignore is that, short of implementing the police state that Toronto Councillor (and world-class fuckhead) Giorgio Mammolitti has wet dreams about creating, you aren't going to break gangs by law enforcement means.
Law enforcement and academics alike often refer to gangs as "criminal enterprises," which makes sense since they aren't the singing social clubs that West Side Story would have you believe. Anyone who knows anything will tell you that the point of an enterprise, criminal or otherwise, is to make money.
The single economic biggest driver of street gangs (and other criminal enterprises that aren't the fucking banks) is drugs.
This is something that I addressed a couple of years ago. The more the government presses on drug criminalization, the greater the risk to those involved in it. The greater the risk is, the higher the profits are when demand doesn't shrink, which it isn't often known to do. When you combine high profits with illegal demand, insane levels of violence are unavoidable. That's especially true when economic downturns actually do create a shrinking market. In a shrinking market, a gang (like any other enterprise) will fight to maintain its share of the market, or increase it at the expense of competitors.
For people that pride themselves on being champions of the capitalism, right-wingers these days don't know very much about it.
The other side of the Harper Tories' crime bill created mandatory minimums for drug offenses. Coupled with the firearms side of the law, that makes drug trafficking more risky, thereby increasing price and profits. Assuming that the Great Recession drove down consumer demand for drugs (which is fair, since it drove down demand for everything else), that redoubles the determination with which gangs will fight for the remaining profits.
Again, the experience of the banks leading up to the financial crisis is instructive. When a market, like the housing bubble, creates irresistible profit opportunities, people will create opportunities to exploit them to maximum effect even when they defy common sense. The Mafia famously stayed away from drugs because they feared the response from law enforcement, but only until the potential profit from the drug trade became too great for them to ignore.
Gun violence in the drug trade creates a government response that punishes both guns and drugs, but naturally drives the profitability of both and thereby increases the incentive to engage in them. This increases the potential for violence as the stupidity spirals upwards. If you expect gangs to act more responsibly than banks to the lure of guaranteed profit, you might just be too fucking dumb to debate..
Gang gun violence is driven almost exclusively by the profitability of the drug market. Deny the gangs that profit, and I can almost assure you that the gun violence will gradually diminish. There is now forty years of Drug War experience that shows that law enforcement can't solve the problem. Simple logic instructs us that the free market can.
Of course, mere decriminalization can't accomplish that, since it would leave the market in the hands of the criminals. Selective legalization won't do it, either. Marijuana legalization will just increase the efforts of criminals to expand the market of drugs that we already know are the most dangerous because of criminalization. You need to go all the way, including cocaine and heroin.
On the other hand, if you legalize cocaine and heroin, the meth epidemic pretty much evaporates. I'm willing to wager that folks won't be willing snort battery acid when given a safer, afforable alternative. But the methamphetamine experience should also teach us all something. When people can figure out how to get high from a wildly combustible combination of Sudafed and battery acid in response to existing drug laws, those drug laws will never work.
When federal control over pseudoephedrine at your local pharmacy has to be established under an anti-terrorism law, all hope of rationally defeating recreational drug use is forever lost. And even those draconian measures haven't stopped gang violence, or even significantly decreased it. They've just created a failed prison industry and forever ruined millions of lives. The law is now more dangerous to the individual than even drugs are.
Finally, the last three presidents of the United States have either admitted to using marijuana or cocaine, or specifically refused to deny it. That being the case, what's a parent supposed to tell his or her fucking kid - "Don't do that or you might wind up being president someday?" The question is even more complicated by the fact that the majority of parents have used recreational drugs, and many continue to do so.
When three admitted or suspected drug users in a row are elected Leader of the Free World, I think that you can rather safely argue that we've crossed the Rubicon of the social acceptability of drug use.
We couldn't build a more perfectly retarded construct around the drug issue if we tried. The situation is such that now the only people who benefit from it are politicians, cops and gangbangers. You sure as fuck don't, and neither did the people on Danzig Street last night. Or the thousands of people in the Eaton Centre last month. Or anyone in Chicago at any given time.
People (and especially conservatives) are going to have to sit down and start thinking about what they prefer: statist, puritanical government regulation of what free people do to their own bodies, or finally doing something to stop innocent people from being shot at neighborhood barbecues.
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