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 News from Around the Americas | January 2006 
Canadian Teen's Slaying Kindles US-Style Gun Control Debate
 Doug Struck - Washington Post
| | A woman leaves flowers at the downtown Toronto site where Jane Creba was shot while shopping with her sister a day after Christmas. Crime has become a hot campaign issue leading up to parliamentary elections next Monday. (Frank Gunn/Canadian Press) |
Toronto - Jane Creba, 15, was browsing the Boxing Day sales with her older sister when she started crossing the street to look for sneakers. She stepped into a spray of gunfire between rival teenage gangs in the middle of the busy downtown shopping district.
Creba died from a single bullet, and six other people were wounded. The Dec. 26 incident climaxed a year of sensational shootings here, propelling the issue of gun violence to the top of the national debate during an election season.
The death of the bright 10th-grader brought a call by Prime Minister Paul Martin for a ban on handguns, which are already tightly regulated. It also prompted a chorus of demands for tougher laws and more police in a country that prides itself on safety and moderation.
"It never used to be like this," said Mabel Clarke, 74, who lives downtown. "You used to be able to walk on the main street, even at night. Now I can't walk anywhere without looking over my shoulder."
Toronto posted a 15-year high in the rate of homicides with firearms in 2005, and the press and the public have begun to fret that the country is becoming infected by the lethal ways of the United States.
"Canadians deserve safe streets. Toronto isn't Detroit. Vancouver isn't south Los Angeles," Martin said. "We are not going to allow our cities to fall into mindless violence."
But in the campaign leading up to next Monday's parliamentary elections, Martin's opponents have lambasted him for failing to get tough with the United States to stop the smuggling of weapons across the border.
"This is the first government that couldn't control the flow of guns," Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper said in a televised debate last week.
During the campaign, all four major parties have endorsed longer mandatory minimum sentences for gun offenses, more police and tougher border controls.
"Make no mistake, a Conservative government is going to crack down on crime in this country," vowed Harper, the current front-runner in opinion polls.
The heated rhetoric has glossed over some nuances, however. Canada's overall homicide rate is largely unchanged and remains about one-third of that of the United States. Last year, Toronto had 52 gun-related homicides; Chicago and Los Angeles, roughly comparable in size, had 338 and 366, respectively.
Furthermore, the number of such homicides in Canada has dropped by one-third since 1991. And gun control advocates say an even more precipitous decline in the number of homicides with rifles and shotguns - a two-thirds drop in 15 years - is a consequence of tighter licensing and registration laws enacted in the 1990s.
Also, Canada already has mandatory minimum sentences for many gun crimes, and Martin's call for a handgun ban contains loopholes that would exempt some target shooters as well as any province that objects to the ban.
But the crime issue strikes a chord with voters.
"I worry about my kids. They get driven everywhere now. We don't want them hanging out," said Manny Martinez, 38, a registered nurse at a Toronto hospital.
The alarm was first raised here in Ontario's capital with a string of public shootings. Before the slaying of Creba, Toronto was rocked by the gang-related killing of a teenager on the steps of a church outside a friend's funeral service in November, and the injury of a 4-year-old boy who was struck four times by gunfire outside his family's apartment in August. In November 2004, an 11-year-girl was wounded in the head when she was caught in crossfire on a city bus.
The shootings - and their victims - have been disproportionately among blacks and other ethnic minorities, an issue that "Canadians are too polite to talk about," said Nelson Wiseman, a political analyst at the University of Toronto. Canada prides itself on its successful acceptance of a diverse ethnic mix, and the society observes a political etiquette in which race and ethnicity are often not openly mentioned.
"We have Jamaican gangs in Toronto, Haitians in Montreal, Southeast Indo-Asian gangs in Vancouver, Indian and native gangs elsewhere in the country," said Gary Mauser, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Recognizing the socioeconomic factors associated with higher crime, all of the political candidates have accompanied their call for tougher laws with proposals to expand spending on social programs. But the violence carried out by ethnic gangs and their increasing use of handguns is slowly breaking the polite silence.
The Rev. Eugene Rivers, a black American leader prominent for his work in reducing violence in Boston, came to Toronto last week and publicly chastised the black community, admonishing its members to take responsibility for fatherless homes and wayward youths.
Jamaican Canadians in Toronto say they object to being singled out, but many also say they must work on problems in their community.
"I don't like it when they play the racial card," said the septuagenarian Clarke, a black immigrant from the West Indies, as she sipped coffee downtown. "But people have to change. They have to take responsibility."
Despite Canada's reputation for safety, its rate of violent crime is not much different from that of the United States when gun crimes are not included, according to Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, a Canadian group.
But Canada is keen to avoid the U.S. model, with nearly one gun on average for every person, fueling a homicide rate akin to war-torn countries, she said.
"It's not a Canadian value for Canadians to carry handguns," insisted Amy Butcher, a spokeswoman for Martin. "We strongly believe there is no place in our society for handguns."
Other than law enforcement and military personnel, only target shooters, collectors and a small group of trappers and bush pilots may legally own handguns. Hunters are allowed to own long guns, but they must be registered.
Registration for all handguns has been required since 1934, and regulations have been periodically strengthened. Now, approximately 500,000 handguns are legally registered in the hands of collectors and target shooters.
Long guns - rifles and shotguns - came under the controls in 1995 during another spasm of concern about crime, following a 1989 mass murder at a Montreal school in which 14 women were killed and 13 were wounded. All guns must now be registered and all owners must be licensed.
But the registry and licensing program has been controversial. The cost has soared with bureaucracy, which collectors and shooters say is suffocating. Some doubt the program's effect on crime, while critics point out that none of it deals with illegal guns.
The proposed handgun ban "would cost taxpayers a lot of money, and it would not improve crime rates," said Mauser, the criminologist. "Very few legally registered guns are stolen and find their way into crimes."
Sometimes this happens, however. A gun used in a triple murder here in September was stolen from a collector's stash after thieves worked two days with a sledgehammer and blowtorch to break through his concrete-and-steel safe.
Guns kept by collectors "are just one break-in away from being used in a crime," Martin said.
Researcher Robert Thomason in Washington contributed to this report. |
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