A rchive Date
[ 31-10-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
|
[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/williamson.html
So it doesn't happen here, eh?
By LINDA WILLIAMSON -- Toronto Sun
October 31, 2002
Seeking comfort in the wake of Toronto's own Bloody Sunday - four frightening fatal shootings in one night - I decided to catch a movie. Specifically, Bowling For Columbine, the latest effort from leftie director and gadfly Michael Moore.
This is a movie, you see, in which Moore not only laments America's gun culture and astronomical crime rate - he also extols Canada as a veritable utopia where, even though there are plenty of guns, crime is way low and people don't even lock their doors. I kid you not. Moore actually walks into several unlocked homes in Toronto, camera rolling. When he asks a group of young Canadians what makes us so much more peaceable than the U.S., they just shrug politely, eh?
His simplistic point: Canada is much more open, caring and tolerant and far less racist, violent and fearful. Hmmm.
After a week in which the dominant local news stories have been: a) a bizarre newspaper investigation that accused police of racism because they disproportionately stop and arrest blacks; and b) four shocking murders, all involving young, mostly black men shooting other young black men, that's just a tad too ironic, even for a master ironist like Moore.
Still, it hits home, given that these recent shootings are the sort of crimes too many sanctimonious Canadians still like to think of as "American-style," i.e., can't happen here.
Moore, like so many in the federal Liberals' justice department, perpetuates that flawed perception, reminding us that crime rates are lower than they have been in decades. He blames media hype, not the actual crime we see around us, for exaggerating people's fears.
He even suggests the 9/11 terrorist attacks have escalated those irrational fears, resulting in more stockpiling of weapons in individual homes and, of course, in war talk from Washington.
Such arguments, I'm afraid, strike me as pointless. Sure, the media, driven by 24-hour news cycles, may exaggerate some threats (remember the shark attacks of 2001, pre-9/11?), but there are times when fear is plainly sensible - like when terrorists kill 3,000 people on your soil. Or, say, when a pair of snipers start randomly murdering people in your capital.
DECISIVE ACTION
Times and crimes like these call for strong, swift defensive action. As, I'd argue, do incidents in which large groups of young, armed men are bursting into dance clubs and firing off dozens of bullets.
So what if Toronto's 2002 murder rate is well below that of other years, and a fraction of what U.S. cities suffer? Do we not grieve for the young dead and the five injured? Should we not be outraged that these "club shootings" are becoming more and more common in our city?
We needn't live in fear, but we need to open our eyes and get angry. We have a problem. We may be blessed with a low crime rate, but surely that's more reason, not less, to demand action to nip it in the bud.
It's not as complicated as all the social theorists would have it, either. Leave aside the race issue for a moment - start with the guns, stupid.
Moore's right on this point - while Canada is a nation of law-abiding rifle and shotgun owners (he should tell it to the feds and their billion-dollar registry, which does nothing to curb actual gun crime), our criminals favour increasingly available illegal handguns, mostly smuggled in from the U.S.
The Sun's Tom Godfrey reported yesterday that customs agents seized 364 handguns - about one a day - at Southern Ontario border crossings last year. Imagine how many hundreds more are getting through.
So why don't we have severe penalties for anyone who commits a crime with a gun or who's caught with one illegally? I'm talking life sentences - the kind the Liberals are loath to impose. Give the cops the resources to get handguns off our streets - instead of funding the rifle registry's bureaucracy.
And why not shut down the clubs where these incidents happen repeatedly, as one Toronto councillor suggests?
It's not racist to talk plainly about who's involved in these crimes, or to try earnestly to figure out why blacks are disproportionately represented, as are natives and other minorities in other types of crime. (Poverty, drugs and gangs all play a part, both here and in the U.S., Moore's rose-coloured glasses notwithstanding.)
What is racist, if you ask me, is to turn a blind eye to these terrible murders as we so often do; to dismiss them as incidents that don't affect "us" in safe, mainstream Canada.
That would be the Canada that smugly leaves its doors unlocked - literally and figuratively. Because we don't have those "American-style" problems here, eh?
Linda Williamson is the Toronto Sun senior associate editor. She can be reached by e-mail at linda.williamson@tor.sunpub.com.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|