What Solutions Don't Include

* Not one new basketball court!
* Not one make work program!
* Blaming me & my ancestors!
* Blaming George Bush!

Interpreting Toronto's murder tally

What should we make of the large number of homicides in Toronto this year?

While shootings are down, murders -- now at 80 with a month left to go -- are ahead both of last year's pace and even of 2005's notorious year of the gun.

There's a chance Toronto could record its highest murder tally ever -- breaking the previous mark of 89 set in 1991.

Our view is that this is cause for concern, but not panic. In fact, the murder count for any one year doesn't tell us a lot.

For example, while the 41 gun murders to date this year are ahead of the 27 that occurred to this point in 2006, they're down from the 50 recorded to this date in 2005, when the final tally of 52 was a record.

What we do learn from the homicide stats of the past few years is this: Despite living in, statistically, one of the safest cities in North America, we have a persistent problem with gang and gun violence, mainly involving young black men living in urban ghettoes, who are disproportionately both the shooters and victims.

That's not something the police can solve alone.

Here's what needs to be done:

First, a toughening of our revolving door justice system, in which gun-toting gangsters are often back on the street before the police can finish their paperwork on the arrest.

Second, Toronto school trustees need to start backing teachers trying to maintain discipline in classrooms in troubled schools, instead of denying there's a problem, shuffling troubled students between schools, wasting public money on endless studies and offering up meaningless tokenism, such as establishing one "black focused" elementary school. Big deal.

Third, Premier Dalton McGuinty needs to fix the education funding formula, since right now it underfunds boards like Toronto, leaving trustees scrambling to pinch pennies rather than develop sound programs, particularly to address the chronic high dropout rate among black youth.

Finally, until more parents in the communities breeding these gun-toting gangsters start acting like parents instead of overgrown children themselves, particularly absentee fathers, nothing will ever change.