T.O. Numbah One wif a Bullet

Shooting is in the headlines again to-day in Toronto, generally those stories are buried somewhere in section A, or B.

You may recall Toronto's 'summer of the gun' two years ago. That engendered a 'massive' police response to gang violence and the tossing of millions to steer at-risk youth away from a life of crime in the period since.

If you read past page one of Toronto's main rags, you might have gotten the impression that shootings remain an integral part of the TO experience.

Yes, there were gang round-ups and weapons confiscations, but the wheel of 'justis' has ground on and the 'perps' arrested have been granted bail and the freedom to put their lives back together. In short the shooting has never stopped, it just wasn't 'hyped'. Until yesterday, anyway.

Jordan Manners a 15 year-old budding artist, grade 'A' student and generally great kid managed to find himself alone in his high school long enough for somebody to 'go gangsta' on him. In a school population of about a thousand, locked-down for security reasons afterward, nobody saw a thing, or at least a thing that could help the cops. Jordan was another 'victim' of his environment.

Driftwood Avenue area has been a sink of every malady known to mankind since it was built in the early seventies. A nexus of the welfare mentality coupled with the macho posturings of the Caribbean male. Petty crime, often assisted by firearms, has been endemic there all along. How did it come to pass in Toronto the good? Immigration - or more particularly the lax kind of immigration. TO is full of economic migrants, not all of whom are willing to work toward a better life. There are the kind that want the better life, but are willing to do without the work aspect. Welfare was the original drawing card, but stealing provides the better things in life, these migrants were like AliBaba and his forty. Toronto seems to be a haven of some kind for them.

Policing Toronto is more expensive and more difficult than ever before. In that regard it is truly a 'world-class' city. The problem is that we have a justice system that is oriented toward the criminal and out of sympathy with the victim. I believe in second chances, but if immigrants, or their children are repeat offenders they ought to have another chance to come to Canada, but they should be sent home first. For example, three years jail time for stealing should play out as 5 years back in St. Lucia, Grenada or wherever one originated. A second chance to settle in Canada, should also be a last chance. If these folk have some skewed vision of citizenship, they need to re-educate themselves, preferably in their homeland. They shouldn't receive a living from the Canadian people to keep on doing their cultural thing.

Nobody is willing to say it, but 90 percent of Toronto's shootings are done by black men. So far most of the targets have been black men. Shooting is a black-community problem, they have to deal with it, or take it back home where guns and bullets are harder to come-by, and there's not so much worth stealing. Our government shouldn't discriminate by spending millions to help black people with a problem that they created and that isn't going away anytime soon.

It's a pity that shootings happen to those so young, but happening at all is the mark that something is woefully inadequate.