On guns

Those who know me know how strongly I feel about guns. If there were a National Stifle The Rifle Agency, I'd be its Charlton Heston. I've been forced to re-examine those beliefs in the bloody wake of all the gun homicides in Toronto this year.
Nearly every weekend the gunfire erupts, sometimes only injuring people, but often--31 times this year often--killing them. One death gets a mention in the papers; 31 seems to have had some actual effect on Toronto politicians and police officers.
The chief, Bill Blair, has taken steps: formerly deskbound senior officers will now be out walking a beat. Not sure what exactly that will accomplish: in the gang-banger mentality, they're just (pardon the crudity) more pigs to the slaughter...not to mention that five or ten years driving a desk can't be good for one's street sense.
Blair's 'community policing' initiatives involve such things as police-teenager basketball games in what used to be called 'slums' and 'ghettos' but are now referred to as 'disadvantaged areas'. These are supposed to convince the yowwens that the police are their friends before the gangbangers can lure them in with the MTV lifestyle (live hard, die harder). My sense is the gangstas have a real edge here: they've got popular culture to back them up. The entertainment industry seems to have made a concerted effort over the past twenty years or so to convince people that murder is cool. I can't figure out why, but, what the hell, it's worked.
Perhaps the community policing approach is effective. It certainly seems Canadian, doesn't it?
Inclusive, tolerant, urban peacekeeping. There's no hard data, though. There can't be. How are you supposed to track all the people that might have murdered others, but didn't? The might-haves just don't show up in the records.
I'll tell you what approach does work: 'broken-window' policing. Before 9/11, Rudolph Giuliani was most known for his direction in this area. The basic premise is: if you arrest people for petty offenses (pissing in the street, breaking windows, and so on), you won't see as many bigger offenses (drug dealing, murder). The crackdown on the little stuff has reduced New York City's crime rate dramatically, to the point where I'd feel safer in Times Square on a Friday night than I would at Yonge and Dundas. And I never thought I'd say that.
One problem, though, and it's a doozie. As long as we have appointed, rather than elected, judges in this country, no amount of policing will accomplish a damned thing. I can't prove this, but I strongly believe prospective judges are partially lobotomized. How else to explain the insane sentence fragments? Jared shoots Raul in the head. Raul dies. Because Jared comes from a 'disadvantaged area', he gets a year in jail followed by two years of probation. If Jared also killed Rafar, by all means, slap an extra six months on his term. That'll learn him!
What kind of world are we living in, people? Let's take back our courts! Let's take back our streets!
The politicians have some ideas to that end. Mayor Miller believes that we need to lock up everybody's gun in some central repository, as if criminals had a hard time getting guns in their hands as it is now.
The gun control freak in me loves the idea. Yep: lock 'em all up. Better yet, destroy 'em. Once that's done, you'll stop hearing those news reports about all the break-ins. You know, the ones where people break into homes at random until they find guns, which they then use to go on a shooting ramp...
What was that? You haven't heard any stories like that?
Well, that's because there haven't been any, but let's not let Mayor Miller in on that, okay? The sky is so nice and pink in his world.
Shhh...the guns plaguing Toronto streets are almost all unregistered and most of them have never been in law-abiding hands. Miller's right on one thing, though: many of them come from the States. Several years ago, I read that the going rate was one pound of marijuana for one sub-machine gun.
We have to make a real dent in this river of lead before the violence can abate. I'm not sure how, exactly, to do this. But I would suggest that Ottawa divert a large part of its anti-terrorism budget (or better yet, increase it) to fight this...well, terrorism. Does it really matter if the terrorists use bullets instead of bombs?