Toll mounts after deadly shooting amid Toronto shoppers

Toll mounts after deadly shooting amid Toronto shoppers
Last Updated Mon, 26 Dec 2005 19:48:04 EST
CBC News

The number of known victims is climbing after a shooting amid hundreds of shoppers in downtown Toronto on Boxing Day, with police saying a girl has died and at least six other people have injuries.

Officers initially said only four people had been wounded in the gunfire, but they told CBC News at about 7:30 p.m. EST that at least seven people had been shot.

The shootings occurred at 5:20 p.m. EST along a strip of stores, restaurants and bars on one of the best-known streets in the country, Yonge Street, about two blocks north of Dundas Street and the Eaton Centre shopping mall.

Police officials earlier told CBC News shortly that a girl, who had been rushed to hospital in serious condition, had died.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/12/26/toronto-shooting-051226.html

Why would anyone want to shoot at kids?

they could have defended themselves.

the balls. No other Western country has murder rates like yours. WAKE UP!

It IS relatively low compared to the crime rate in this country. I think you misunderstood the comment. It's not as though there's such thing as a 'good' or bad' size (every murder is tragic), but 78 murders is nothing compared to say Chicago, a US city with a smaller population (Chicago had 415 murders this year with a population of 2.8 million - compared to Toronto with 78 with a population of over 4 million).

murder - but systematic? Come on. We can put men on the moon. We can get that crime rate down. I didn't mean to imply you were warped. For sure you'd love to have our crime rates. But that doesn't mean we should sit on our asses and let our cities go down the drain in the same way the US has.

Nip the problem in the bud. Upping jail time for illegal gun ownership will get rid of a few gang bangers for a bit - and ten years will make them adults when they get out of jail - instead of teens.

If you exclude three Social-Economic Groups from the US Murder rate, the rate is less than any other Western Country (Except Japan which has a very low rate but seems to be tied in with their non-western Cultural history than anything else). The three groups are, inner city Blacks, Rural Southerns (Both black and Whites) and American Indians. The high murder rate among Native Americans is NOT a addressed in this thread for like the low rates among Japanese seems to be tied in with Cultural influences that pre-date Modern Society and is only 1/2 the rate for Blacks and Rural Southern Whites). The big factor in the high US Murder rate is the much larger Rural Southern murder rate (Both Whites and Blacks) and inner city Black Murder Rates (like the Rural Southern Murder rate, MUCH higher in murder per thousand and in total murders).

The Inner City Black murder rate can be traced to the Rural south and thus both are inter-related. For years the NRA pointed out the much higher Murder rates of Blacks without looking into details. The reason for this is that the rate reflects the fact that till WWII, Blacks lived predominate in the Rural South and thus had the same attitude to violence as Rural Southern Whites. Blacks today are now in at least the third generation of Blacks living in Northern Cities and thus the connection to the Rural South is quickly disappearing and with it the high murder rate.

One of the "Fun" Statistics in history is that every American City had lower than Average Murder rates for the US prior to the 1960s. The reason for this was the extremely high Rural Southern Murder Rate. Only in the 1960s did American Cities started to exceed the US Average Murder rate (and this seems to be do to the influx of Southern Blacks). Now not only did inner-city murder rates exceeded the Average Murder rate for the US in the 1960s, the rates also peaked AND HAVE BEEN DROPPING EVER SINCE. Thus the problem of the increased murder rates of the 1950s and 1960s seems to be the influx of people with that Rural Southern violence tradition. This ended in the 1960s as one generation replaced another so that Rural the Southern Traditions of the displaced Rural Southern Blacks of the 1940s and 1950s was replaced with the much less violent Northern Traditions of the Puritans.

Another factor in the "High" US inner city Crime rate is the emergence of the Suburbs. Many inner cities contain less than 1/3 of the total population of an area, yet are centrally located with a lot of older housing stock (and thus a higher percentage of Low income people). Thus in the 1960s you started to see rates raise in the inner city while the crime rate in the urban area as a whole declined. This movement to the suburbs has continued and it shows you how much crime in the US has dropped since the 1960s in that Crime rates for inner cities have dropped since the 1960s DESPITE THE MOVEMENT OF HIGHER INCOME PEOPLE (who tend to have lower crime rates) FROM THE INNER CITIES TO THE SUBURBS.

My point here is to state (once again, I have done it often) of the difference between the rest of Western Society and the American Rural South. The reason for this high crime rate has been touched on by many observers, and various reasons have been given for it. The best explanation was the nature of Slavery. As part of the effort to control the Slaves, the Whites of the American South had to participate in "Patrols". These "Patrols" had the right to check any black walking along the road to make sure they were NOT run-a-way slaves, nor slaves getting together to form a Slave Revolt. These patrols had the right to punish any Black on the spot for any infraction (even if untrue) up to and including killing the Black (Even if a Free Black or someone's slave). Since all White Males had to participate in these Patrols, all White Males learn to use violence to solve any dispute. The Blacks (Both Free and Slave) grew up in this same environment and internalized the same basic outlook in life (Thus thought very much like the Whites in the Patrols). Legal "Patrols" ended with the end of the Civil War, but the tradition was strong among Rural whites and thus continued after the Civil War illegally as a social gathering (and anti-black gatherings), and than in the segregated south of the 1890s-1960s both as a social gatherings and as a means to repress the now freed Blacks. This long history of Violence leads to the use of violence in everyday situation and thus the high crime rate for both Whites and Blacks in the Rural South.

Another theory is that the South was settled by herders of Scotland and Ireland (Unlike the farmers who settled the American North) and herding societies tend to be violent for unlike farming communities, herding Societies can lose all of their herd to a thief in an instance, by the time law enforcement shows up the herd can be long gone, thus such herding society tend to very violent, you defend your property yourself for no one else will it for you.

A third theory is that the South has always underfunded everything in Government (including law enforcement), thus to get justice you had to do it yourself which leads to a very violent Society. A fourth theory is that the South is the last outpost of medieval Europe where people did not depend on the law but instead defended themselves (This is tied in with the heading theory).

My personal opinion is it is a combination of all four (In the order I list the theories with the greatest effect being the first two, the last two more excuse than reason), but the real issue is NOT why the South is so violent, but why has the Murder Rate of Blacks DECLINED since Blacks have moved north after WWII? This shows that the Rural Southern Murder rate can also decline if we can adopt the same rules (please note Gun Control seems NOT to be the answer given the decline is in both cities with strict gun controls and northern cities without strict gun controls). Why has the decline occurred? And can we duplicate it in the Rural South and thus reduce the overall US Murder rate to the same rate as the rest of the Western World?

Your point is well taken. But I work in mostly Hispanic neighborhood and I see the effects of a much higher violence rate there, too. I think the key ingredients are geographic mobility, drugs, alcohol abuse, and gangs. All of which, of course, feed on each other.

zero. So would yours. Stats are like that.

Sad.. NRA does have us by the balls.

Perhaps it goes up to 16,000 a year if you include accidental deaths by gun and suicides.

That is like 5 9/11s every year. A single gun mired city in the USA has more deaths in a year than the intifada in Palestine & Israel.

In the U.S. for 2001, there were 29,573 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 16,869; Homicide 11,348; Accident 802; Legal Intervention 323; Undetermined 231.(CDC, 2004) This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S. The number of firearms-related injuries in the U.S., both fatal and non-fatal, increased through 1993, but has since declined steadily.(CDC, 2001) However, firearms injuries remain a leading cause of death in the U.S., particularly among youth (CDC, 2004).

Source:

http://www-medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GUNS/GUNSTAT.html


Firearms Death Rate (per 100,000, age adjusted)
for Selected Countries
in one year between 1990 and 1995
(Krug, Powell and Dahlberg, 1998)

much for backing me up when I was too lazy to do my homework.

:bounce:

Doesn't Scotland have a higher murder rate?

Darfur. Or uganda or "new" Congo.

the Union Jack nowhere in sight?

in the South? There are really good reasons to not fly the confederate flag and really good reasons to fly the Scottish flag. But neigher makes them a Western Nation.

Do we want to go through stats on education and scientific discoveries and divide them by Red State & Blue State?

We could. It would tell us something. But that is not how it is counted.

this is going to be an argument that doesn't go away. Perhaps it will turn out to be something like endemic poverty and huge/massive (almost forced) migration for 200 years. I look forward.

I wasn't initially trying to defend America. I just think Scotland is a very interesting case of how a largely gunless country can develop crime rates similar to America's.

the only example you could come up with was a "region".

on edit: check out http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,1596077,00.html when you decide to admit that Scotland is increasingly sovereign and on its way to home rule.

2nd edit to remove nt in subject line

Sad, the type of sickness that is in some people.

I have always comforted myself with the fact that these things don't happen in Canada. We must be contagious.

It's as if someone came driving into Times Square and started shooting at people. Except in a case like that, as horrible as it would be, some people would shrug it off and say "Oh well, it's New York."

This is Toronto. It's like that shooting in the college classroom in Montreal years ago--that kind of awfulness just doesn't happen a whole lot in Canada.

On Yonge Street. A street I have walked down at 2 in the morning countless times and felt perfectly safe, because it was full of life and people.

It's just hard to believe.

> There were a record number of deaths by gunfire
> (in Toronto) – 52 – reported by Dec. 26, out of 78
> slayings in total.

I presume they're only counting homicides. Toronto has a population of 4.5 million. 52 gun deaths is 1.15 per 100,000 population.

Los Angeles has a population of 3.8 million and had 815 homicides by gunfire in 2000. That's 21.4 per 100,000.

L.A. too "ethnic" for you?

The next two most populous cities in the US are Chicago and Houston. Together, they have 4.8 million people.

Chicago alone had 511 homicides by gunfire in 2002. I can't find the statistics for Houston, but making the idiotic assumption they had none, that would still be 10.9 per 100,000.

Canada's gun-homicide rate is at least 90-95% lower than the US.

-----

Let's compare 1998 figures for entire countries. Here is a comparison of the number of firearm homicides:

* 373 in Germany
* 151 in Canada
* 57 in Australia
* 19 in Japan
* 54 in England and Wales

* 11,789 in the United States

and actively waging a war on its lower classes in the name of fighting drugs.

It's like everyone is an actor that knows their role in the Big Game. Twisted.

We have a local program that seems to be doing quite a bit of good; it's a 'drug court' program that involves getting people help getting off of the most serious drugs, such as heroin and methamphetamine.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/12/27/canada.crime.ap/index.html

Canadian officials, seeking to make sense of another fatal shooting in what has been a record year for gun-related deaths, said Tuesday that along with a host of social ills, part of the problem stemmed from what they said was the United States exporting its violence.

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Toronto Mayor David Miller warned that Canada could become like the United States after gunfire erupted Monday on a busy street filled with holiday shoppers, killing a 15-year-old girl and wounding six bystanders -- the latest victims in a record surge in gun violence in Toronto.

The shooting stemmed from a dispute among a group of 10 to 15 youth, and the victim was a teenager out with a parent near a popular shopping mall, police said Tuesday.

"I think it's a day that Toronto has finally lost its innocence," Det. Sgt. Savas Kyriacou said. "It was a tragic loss and tragic day."

To my friends in Toronto, a truly beautiful city, my heart goes out to you all and most of all, to the victims.

Sid

Just in the last year, handgun sales have increased. Considering that handguns are illegal except for "collectors" and sport shooters, this is an alarming trend.

It means that people are arming themselves.

Outlawing handguns entirely is a partial solution. Next we've got to stem the flow of cheap, easily concealed guns from the US.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051225.wxguns26/BNStory/National/

And it seems to be because gun owners are hoping previous owned guns will be grandfathered.

The law of unintended consequences....

In Canada they didn't go crazy with public housing -but where they did they made the communities parks with few streets intersecting - so police cannot get into heart of anything or pursue perps in cars. So they are rebuilding those communities to put streets in and constantly pushing multi-economic mixes in communities. Putting subsidized buildings as a mix of public and private space. Doesn't always work but we try and we need to try harder in all ways.

Seriously, Canada already has some of the stricted laws on the books dealing with handguns.

So tell me how this would have stopped this?

Isn't this an issue of illegal guns being used by gangs or did I miss something?

And then you throw people with illegal guns in jail for 10 years instead of 5. You do everything to stop the problem.

"You do everything to stop the problem."

This doesn't stop the problem, the problem appears to be gang violence. A total gun ban when there are already very strict regulations in effect is cosmetic.

out and try and Kaser Susay the issue. The issue is simple. You have a problem, a serious problem developing, you look at all means to combat it. As a society. And you all sacrifice to make sure the issue is solved. Or you could just let it fester - to make more money.

...because this issue is important to them.

"As a society. And you all sacrifice to make sure the issue is solved."

That's the point this is a worthless sacrfice that will not end gang violence predicated with already illegal weaponry. It's akin to W's spying, sure maybe it will stop a terrorist attack but do we want to sacrfice our privacy for the appearance of doing something to solve the problem?

be able to go to the gun club. We just don't have to buy the gun love hook, linker & sink. We can stop the madness that has only ever led to more murder (the institution of gun love & the over-supply of guns in a consumer society).

When you are adult you get to choose what sort of society you live in. And part of that involves sacrifice.

Gun lovers in provinces without huge metropolitan areas will not be affected by the ban. Just the trafficking laws.

A great plan.

A couple of posts have cited Toronto's population as 4.5 million. While this is essentially true, considering that the city sits in a continuous urban area that stretches many miles along Lake Ontario, the actual population of the City of Toronto is around 2.4 million, making it North America's fifth-largest city.

The 78 murders is the number that occurred within the City of Toronto, not in the GTA(Greater Toronto Area), which makes homicides per 100,000 significantly higher than has been stated here.

That said, in the many years I've lived here (I'm a Floridian, BTW), the city has never topped 100 murders in a year. Compared to American cities, Toronto is almost absurdly safe.

And that said, the city faces a growing problem of handgun violence, which most analysts trace to the easy availability of handguns in the United States. Perhaps a sad comment on the state of border security in both countries?

Canada is prepared to completely ban guns, and we can't even pass any gun control laws.
We have mentally ill people with guns, we have people with restraining orders against them with guns, etc.

I was in Toronto in early August, during a wave of violence that included the shooting of a 4-year-old boy in Jane and Finch. The mayor was blaming the U.S. even then, too. It's not just guns, it's also the glamorization of the gangsta lifestyle in hip-hop culture. I talked to a social worker who said kids in the neighborhood love anything American and want to move to the United States, because this is where the excitment is. Toronto has a population of isolated, marginalized West Indians who are ripe for recruitment into the gang life. In law and word, Canada is a tolerant, multi-cultural society, but most British Canadians are not the Welcome Wagon types. "Toronto the Good" rivals Cincinnati and Washington as the most uptight city in North America.

Canada wants you to believe it's a perfect society polluted by its nasty Southern neighbor, but that's not the case. That's rhetoric from politicians who want to blame someone else for their failure to solve the country's social ills. There are plenty of ethnic tensions there. Winnipeg is actually the most violent city in the country, thanks to gangs of Native youths, who are even worse off than the Jamaicans.

The good thing is, Canadians are still outraged over the murders. Here in Chicago, a street killing doesn't even make the front page of the Metro section. Sadly, we accept it now.

Sadly, we accept it now.

I sure hope we Canadians do not ever become like that. I hope we never forget each and every one. Every murder should be an outrage. :cry: