With public concern mounting, Toronto Mayor John Tory has made a wide-ranging call to not only police and upper governments but also residents themselves to better combat a spate of gun violence he says is threatening the very essence of the city.
“This is absolutely totally unacceptable. This is not the way we live in this city,” an at-times frustrated Tory said Wednesday, a day after a man was gunned down in broad daylight in a normally quiet Yonge-Eglinton midtown neighbourhood.
READ MORE: Deadly shooting in Toronto’s Yonge and Eglinton neighbourhood, police seek 2 suspects
It was the 21st gun killing in 2016, more than double the count this time last year, while the city is averaging at least one shooting a day.
With a sleeping 10-year-old boy injured in one incident, and a pregnant mother and her baby killed in another, the firearm violence is beginning to evoke concerns not seen since 2005’s so-called “summer of the gun.”
Tory stopped short of calling the spate of gunfire out of control, but said it was shocking, scary and “much worse than it has been and much worse than it should be.”
He laid blame on a “tiny minority of people… engaged in retaliatory activity” — and said all corners have a role in stopping them.
“I’m not only asking for the help of the police service, the other governments, but I’m asking for the help of the people of Toronto to gather up their courage and to understand how vital it is that they come forward and help us to garner the information that will lead to the arrest of these gangsters,” Tory said.
He said that no less than the relative peace and harmony that “distinguishes Toronto from other big cities” is at stake.
“We’ve found a way to live together. We’ve found a way to make sure that whatever our differences are don’t erupt into violence,” Tory said. “And these gangsters… they threaten that.”
To fight the shootings, police are considering redeploying officers while the city is fixing broken lights and installing new surveillance cameras on public housing properties. A gun-amnesty program is also being debated.
But Tory said more must be done, and called on not only citizens to report anyone involved in guns or gangs but also Ottawa to better stop the cross-border smuggling of illegal guns, which make up half of firearms seized by police.
In a letter sent to the provincial and federal ministers responsible for public safety issues, the mayor is asking for improved methods of stopping the flow of crime guns, and for higher levels of community program funding to keep at-risk youth from being swept up in gangs.
Federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale’s office said he has reached out for a meeting with Tory, adding that cross-government collaboration is essential to stopping gang violence. Ontario Community Safety Minister Yasir Naqvi said he too will meet with Tory and Goodale, and in a statement called preventing the “root causes of violence” critical.
On Tuesday, Global News reported that border officials have seized a steadily increasing number of guns at the border over the past four years, which may indicate that more are being smuggled.
A gun smuggler can make about 10 times the original purchase price of a handgun once it’s in Canada, says Christian Luprecht, a professor at Queen’s University and the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont.
Luprecht studied gun smuggling in a 2014 paper which looked at evidence in six Ontario criminal cases.
Smugglers minimize risk by getting someone else to take the risk of a border crossing with a gun shipment, and by having a few large shipments of many guns: “You want to do one shipment and one handover, because it reduces your chances of detection.”
“The people who run the guns across the border are never the people who actually sell them,” he explains.
“Mules (couriers) run them across the border, and there’s an interesting gender dimension – it tends to be women, and it tends to be vulnerable women. Single moms, people on welfare get recruited as mules.”
The gun pipelines that supply Canada seem to be the same as those that supply the northern United States, where cities often have gun laws that are at least as strict as Canada’s. In both cases, dealers buy guns in states with lax gun laws, especially Georgia, and ship them north.
“The problem is a small number of unscrupulous gun dealers who are prepared to push the law to the limits,” Luprecht says.
Sophisticated criminal organizations have a “systematic procurement pipeline of weapons,” he says. The Jamaica-based Shower Posse gang, for example, had a U.S.-based organization whose only role was to buy guns for shipment to Canada.
“We do know that the network for trafficking these weapons is vast.”
On the demand side, buyers are motivated by fear, says Jooyoung Lee, a University of Toronto sociology professor who is an expert on gun violence.
“Everyday life, for young folks who live in neighbourhoods where there is a higher rate of gang violence is filled with situations of uncertainty. Part of it is a sense of security – a sense of perceived safety that comes from owning or carrying a firearm.”
Guns are often bought by a group of people, he says.
“The gun often has multiple lives and gets passed around in social networks.”
With files from David Shum
Toronto Mayor John Tory will appear on The Morning Show on Thursday June 9 to discuss the city’s recent spike in gun violence
Read Mayor John Tory’s letter to upper government ministers below