Cdn-Firearms Digest Monday, July 21 2008 Volume 11 : Number 770 In this issue: Editorial: More than law needed to end gun violence Re: Toronto Sun: Gunfire sprayed at cops, crowd Shooting investigation closes King St. in Parkdale - Toronto Star Toronto Star: The criminals among us ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, July 21, 2008 8:27 am From: "Breitkreuz, Garry - Assistant 2" Subject: Editorial: More than law needed to end gun violence PUBLICATION: The Daily News (Nanaimo) DATE: 2008.07.21 EDITION: Final SECTION: Ours & Yours PAGE: A10 SOURCE: The Daily News WORD COUNT: 647 - -------------------------------------------------------------------------- More than law needed to end gun violence - -------------------------------------------------------------------------- At opposite ends of the country on the same weekend, four young men die after gunfire breaks out. The first incident was in Victoria, just 90 minutes south of here, when a 20-year-old man was fatally shot, and two men with him wounded in the early hours of Saturday. The next incident was in Toronto in the early hours of Sunday, when three men -- also in their 20s -- were found shot to death in a vehicle. Victoria may be closer than Toronto, and we may be shocked that such violence has happened in such a quiet city, still having difficulty shaking the moniker "for the newly wed and the nearly dead." But let Nanaimo residents not forget how gunfire erupted on our streets in December 1995. At a former karaoke club on Wesley Street three men were shot, none fatally, but a 21-year-old man was stabbed to death in the resulting melee. It was gang-related as several men from Vancouver wanted to muscle in on the drug territory in Nanaimo. The Toronto deaths are believed to be gang related, no such link has been made in the Victoria homicide. The main link in all of these crimes is the use of guns. Anyone who thinks that the streets of Victoria or Nanaimo are any safer than Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal, may want to re-evaluate that thought. Anyone who wants a gun can get one with the right contacts and some money. Though we need very strict gun control regulations, it has to be remembered that guns are the last problem. Long before they reach the hands of those who will pull them out to shoot others is a chain of events that need to be carefully scrutinized. The first is the acceptance of living in a society where a culture of violence is tolerated. There appears to be an attitude among most of us that we are resigned to the fact that very violent organized crime gangs are now among us. While there has always been crime and some level of violence in all societies, what we are seeing is excessive if not numerically then for the brazenness. Statistics Canada revealed last week that violent crime is down again for a third year. But there are several things that can't be quantified. First of all no one knows how many guns are out there in the hands of criminals. All we seem to know for sure along those lines is that there are a lot more than there were a few decades ago. And we can't measure or count the kind of violent and ruthless -- sometimes psychopathic -- mind that will make use of them. We have lots of American stereotypes from the prohibition era and the Dirty Thirties of guys with machine guns running around cities like Chicago. But those are American stereotypes, and we are proudly Canadian. We have different traditions and outlooks -- including a constitution that does not include the right to bear arms. We have to ask ourselves if the best gun control is in creating a culture that strongly discourages violence. Perhaps Canadians need to take a stronger moral stance, as distinct from a legal one, around tolerating a culture of violence. Those who use and celebrate the use of violence feel they have a sanction from somewhere. That sanction must be removed before we all end up living in fear, watching as what was once fiction, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess comes to mind, becomes reality. Burgess was focused on the state controlling violence, and becoming an agent of coercion not far off of George Orwell's 1984. And Canada in 2008 has a problem that needs to be solved without directing the state to control the monopoly on violence. Unfortunately, that's the direction of the minority Conservative government's anti-crime agenda. More laws and more prisons for longer sentences. That same strategy has failed spectacularly in the U.S., why would it work here? Yes, we need to get the guns off the street. More importantly we need to take our streets back. http://www.canada.com/nanaimodailynews/news/ours/story.html?id=8214dafc-8ad5-41af-a240-9f0523085fa6 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:18:47 -0500 From: 10x <10x@telus.net> Subject: Re: Toronto Sun: Gunfire sprayed at cops, crowd At , you wrote: > > >PUBLICATION: The Toronto Sun >DATE: 2008.07.20 >EDITION: Final >SECTION: News >PAGE: 3 > >ILLUSTRATION: 1. photo by Rob Lamberti, Sun Media Family members grieve in >the parking lot of a mall where Michael Watson, 28, was killed at a >nightclub early yesterday. 2. photo by John Hanley, Sun Media Police exit >the club on Rylander Blvd. >BYLINE: ROB LAMBERTI, SUN MEDIA >WORD COUNT: 418 > >-------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >Gunfire sprayed at cops, crowd Man murdered in mall nightclub > >-------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >Police are wondering if the gunman who killed Michael Watson in a >Scarborough nightclub early yesterday later opened fire on cops responding >to the shooting. >Banks asks witnesses to call him at 416-808-7411 or his partner Det. Doug >Sansom at 416-808-7391 or Crime Stoppers at 416-222-8477. Toronto seems to have a number of folks who have no respect for other folks. Nor do they have folks willing to stand up and help enforce the laws against crime and violence. Getting the guns off the streets is not going to get the killers off the street, just change their methods to something indiscriminately lethal like Molotov cocktails.... ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:26:18 -0700 (PDT) From: Bruce Mills Subject: Shooting investigation closes King St. in Parkdale - Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/464042 Shooting investigation closes King St. in Parkdale Jul 21, 2008 12:05 AM Henry Stancu Laura Stone Staff Reporters Police closed King St. W. in Parkdale for about five hours last night after a man was shot near a rooming house. Throughout the evening, police evacuated numerous residents while they waited for the ordeal to end. The victim was taken to hospital with minor shotgun wounds to the leg at about 7 p.m. A witness called police after the man was seen bleeding on the street, but no gunshots were heard. Police said the man, who is known to them, was not cooperating and was changing his story about the incident. ETF officers were called and police closed King St. west from Dufferin St. for about three blocks as they focused on a three-storey red brick building broken up into 48 rooms and apartments at the corner of King and Tyndall Ave. The building is a halfway house for psychiatric out patients, residents said. Several residents had fled from the building and police used a megaphone to order remaining occupants to exit the building. One by one, three men were ordered to walk backwards with their hands on their heads to the command post with guns trained on them. A team of 10 heavily armed officers then went into the building and escorted several other people outside, some shirtless and shoeless. Police were focused on one particular unit where it was believed the person responsible for the shooting lived. TTC streetcars were re-routed to Queen St. during the operation. By midnight, more than a dozen people had been brought from the building and people had yet to evacuate the third floor. Residents were taken to the McDonald's restaurant at the corner of King and Dufferin where they waited for the house to be cleared. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, July 21, 2008 8:54 am From: "Breitkreuz, Garry - Assistant 2" Subject: Toronto Star: The criminals among us PUBLICATION: The Toronto Star DATE: 2008.07.21 EDITION: Met SECTION: News PAGE: A01 BYLINE: Jim Rankin and Betsy Powell SOURCE: Toronto Star WORD COUNT: 684 - --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The criminals among us; Not as many lawbreakers as Canadians believe are members of visible minorities, survey shows - -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Crime & punishment - records and race: Third of an eight-part series On any given day in Canada, on any busy city bus, on any main street, take a look around. There are criminals among us - about 10 per cent of adults. Picture the 50 people on the bus, and ask yourself, which five are criminals? Many Canadians identify the wrong people. In a national survey, the Star asked Canadians how many people with a Canadian criminal record are visible minority, including aboriginals. The average response: About one in three. The correct answer: One in six. The real answer comes from a Star analysis of an RCMP database containing the criminal histories of 2.9 million people, obtained through a freedom of information request. It shows that the percentage of "non-whites" with a criminal record is 16.7 per cent - below 2006 Census data on the total percentage of visible minorities and aboriginal groups in Canada (20.0). The average response in the survey was 36.7 per cent. Canadians' perceptions were also off on what proportion of Canada's population is visible minority and immigrant. Respondents guessed high on both counts, which might explain, in part, why misperceptions about criminals are as great as they are. Canadian governments and police forces generally do not distribute race and crime statistics, partly out of a fear it will stigmatize communities and fuel racism. But the lack of information may be another reason why Canadians thought people with criminal records were disproportionately non-white. "The interesting thing about the findings," says University of Toronto criminologist Scot Wortley, "is that under a situation where (race and crime information is not distributed) people still have the perception that minorities are more involved in crime, and in fact this perception is far worse than the reality. In many ways, your data show that this ban on these statistics has not protected minorities at all. In fact, it may have made it worse." Respondents were also off the mark on who has criminal records for certain offences, overestimating for non-white people on each of the crime categories measured in the data. (For more detail, see the adjoining graphic.) Carol Tator and Frances Henry, researchers who have studied crime and media coverage and co-authored a book on racial profiling, argue that Canada presents itself as colour-blind and, hence, there is no need to look for racial differences in police practices and the justice system. Wortley believes there is another reason: "We don't want to be scrutinized, that this is a form of accountability and that the data may make us look bad. ... (There is) a feeling that these data could hurt the image of the justice system." In the wake of a 2002 Star investigative series on race and crime in Toronto, which used police arrest data to show blacks were treated more harshly than whites in certain circumstances, there was renewed talk in Canada of formally tracking the race of people stopped by police. But collecting race/crime data remains officially banned by the Toronto Police Board, despite support for it from many in Toronto's black communities. A 2004 report commissioned by a coalition of African-Canadian groups urged the province to order police to better document who they stop. "You cannot manage what you don't measure," Charles C. Smith, author of the report, said at the time. The Star series prompted Kingston police Chief Bill Closs to examine police stops and searches in his city. The pilot study found that blacks were several times more likely than whites to be stopped. Closs called the data an "early warning system" and urged his colleagues to follow suit. It's believed no police force has. "There is a risk that some of that data could be used inappropriately," Toronto police Chief Bill Blair said in a recent interview. The U.K. has been releasing annual race, crime and prison statistics - as have many U.S. police forces - since 1991, because the government believes that providing such statistics is an "essential step towards ensuring justice for all." According to the 2006 report, blacks were seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites, 31/2 more likely to be arrested, and six times more likely to be in prison. "Disproportionality is a critical issue for the police service," notes the report. http://www.thestar.com/SpecialSections/article/460764 ------------------------------ End of Cdn-Firearms Digest V11 #770 *********************************** Submissions: mailto:cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca Mailing List Commands: mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca Moderator's e-mail address: mailto:drg.jordan@sasktel.net List owner: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca FAQ list: http://www.canfirearms/Skeeter/Faq/cfd-faq1.html Web Site: http://www.canfirearms.ca CFDigest Archives: http://www.canfirearms.ca/archives To unsubscribe from _all_ the lists, put the next four lines in a message and mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca unsubscribe cdn-firearms-digest unsubscribe cdn-firearms-chat unsubscribe cdn-firearms end (To subscribe, use "subscribe" instead of "unsubscribe".)