Saturday Night Special

One wonders how those stalwart residents of the GTA who so desperately wanted the gun registry feel about all the bullets whizzing around Toronto these days. Perhaps they blame the lack of effective gun control on the mismanagement of the Registry by the bureaucrats in Ottawa – or to wherever they farmed the work out, but it will be some time yet before they realize the whole fiasco was nothing more than a waste of time and a harassment of rural folk.

The Mayor of Toronto may be trying to blame the Americans for flooding the market with everything from pocket-sized Saturday night specials to imitation Glocks, but the availability of guns is not the root problem with the recent shootings in the GTA. The problem lies with the rise of the inner-city gangs. There are social issues that create a breeding ground for gangs – under-employment, housing, lack of education, etc. and these problems need the political will and money to address them.

There have always been ‘gangs’ as kids grow up but when they mature and still cling to the gang culture, we have a problem. Whether it is fuelled by the drug trade, gambling or prostitution soon becomes irrelevant when it becomes a way of life. And when the gangs feel they must be armed to the teeth with guns, we have a real problem, not only for the police, but for everyone in the area.

To be sure, the police show off the guns they have collected from gangsters, always including a long gun or shotgun just to be politically correct. They never say that these guns were not all collected at once, the same as they show all the drugs they have seized in a huge pile. Those are photo ops that support the gun registry and drug programs. Even the gangsters know that walking down Finch Ave with a 30-30 carbine stuffed down your pant leg is going to be a little obvious. Is that a really big gun or are you just happy to see me?

A quote in Macleans that “I would rather be caught with a gun by a police officer than by a gang without one” gives us a very good understanding of why the cross-border gun traffic is going to continue. There is a greater respect of the law of the street than there is of the law of the land. That the consequences vary greatly speaks volumes but we should not have to be living in fear of our laws. We should have an understanding of why we have laws and why we cannot permit crimes committed with guns to go unpunished. But that appears to be a hard lesson to teach when it looks like the only path to success leads to lawlessness accompanied by a gun.

Are we destined to follow the American gun culture where we feel we must carry a gun to be safe from ruffians and gangsters? Licensed or unlicensed, will we have a Saturday night special in the glove compartment, just in case? Or is there still time to turn the problem around?

More policemen will no doubt make the gunslingers more cautious, but that alone will do nothing to get to the root causes. We need to fix the social problems that foster the gang mentality and that is going to take a long time, perhaps a couple of generations. In the mean time, we need to stiffen the penalties for these gun-toting gangsters. Or perhaps apply the maximum instead of minimum penalties to these cases. This, of course, would require some backbone by our judges and crown attorneys. And by the politicians who appoint these guardians of the law. Maybe when the shootings start in their neighbourhoods, things will change.

The politicians know that we don’t have the capacity in our penal system to host all these miscreants, so the word comes down the line to make deals and give probation. Mike Harris almost had it right with his idea of super jails run by the private sector. There were some worries by the good-doers that prisoners might not be treated as well by the private sector as in the public institutions, yet that should be a concern of the bad-doers, not the good-doers. But Mike’s idea ought to have been to farm out these jails to countries where they specialize in looking after the bad boys and girls in society.

Would the gang members and triad folk think twice about their career path if they knew that on the first offence with a weapon (no matter their age) they would be going to Syria or Turkey for a few years incarceration? Maybe even a holiday in a new jail in Iraq or Afghanistan? Think of the employment opportunities for those countries. Think of the cost savings for us as we could pay non-union rates to jail guards and wardens in some third-world country to look after our bad boys for a few years! Maybe those who return to public life would not be so blasé about doing the time and would not be held in awe by the Youth Criminal set.

In the meantime, if you are going to Toronto, keep your wits about you and be ready to duck whenever you hear a car backfire – especially on Saturday night.