Toronto chilled by shootings

"Gun deaths: 31" read a Toronto Sun tabloid newspaper headline this week, highlighting the fears that have gripped the biggest metropolis in Canada, a country unaccustomed to violence.

So far, 31 of 45 homicides in Toronto this year were gun-related and local police reported some 20 shootings in just the past few weeks -- a rash of murders in the provincial capital this summer that sharply contrasts a Canada-wide decline in overall crime rates over the past 30 years.

During a 24-hour period last week, two people died and three were injured in two separate shootings. Three murders took place at the same concert hall in one week and a four-year-old child was injured by a stray bullet.

"It's totally unacceptable. We don't want that kind of violence in our city," said Mayor David Miller, echoing local residents who expressed concerns that America's gun culture is creeping north across the Canada-US border.

The victims are mostly young black men gunned down in public places.

To reassure citizens, the mayor and police chief Bill Blair announced 150 new police recruits would be deployed by the end of next year to return peace to troubled neighborhoods.

Others more drastic measures like municipal councilor Michael Thompson, himself a black man, provoking harsh criticism for suggesting that police stop all young black men in distressed neighborhoods and search them for weapons.

The idea was immediately rejected by politicians of all stripes and the police chief, who refused to engage in a "totally inappropriate, unjust and illegal practice of targeting young men on the basis of their race."

Following backlash, Thompson said he only meant to shock people in order to spark debate on the issue.

The police, hard-pressed to explain the explosion of violence, blamed delinquents involved in illegal activities, including drug trafficking, settling scores, but they refused to go as far as to call it gang wars.

"These violent acts are linked to street gangs and drugs, but it's hard to know why we're seeing more of it this year than last summer," said Toronto police spokesperson Isabelle Cotton

"It's too easy for a young Torontonian to procure a firearm, whether it's imported illegally from the United States or not. As well, young people don't seem too concerned about the consequences of their actions," she said.

Weekly Canadian magazine Maclean's noted in its latest edition that gang murders had tripled since the early 1990s in this country, in contrast to an overall drop in violence. The magazine blamed the rise in part on illegal arms from the US.

In the past five years, Canadian authorities seized 5,400 weapons, mostly handguns. According to Maclean's, this represents a mere fraction of the guns that enter Canada from the US.

University Toronto criminologist Rosemary Gartner chooses instead to blame the root cause of violence on cuts to social programs by local conservative governments in recent decades.

"All the cutbacks to welfare, the cuts to school programs for poor families, the reduction of the public health budget: These are all the changes you need to make if you want to increase the level of violent crime in a city," she said, noting that most of those affected by the cuts are now the ones carrying handguns.