Comrade Miller Et Al Will Have To Admit.....

...that some individuals are beyond redemption and should be treating them in the same manner they treat garbage.

No one is 'safe' when bullets fly

With three daylight street murders in the Greater Toronto Area Tuesday, plus a shooting outside a Toronto high school before noon leaving a 16-year-old boy critically injured, you could count on the following.

First, Toronto Mayor David Miller would call for banning handguns.

Second, Toronto District School Board education director Gerry Connelly would say schools remain safe.

Third, the usual suspects would assure us Toronto is safe and crime's going down.

Let's deal with this nonsense in reverse order.

First, while violent crime across Canada has dipped slightly since reaching a peak in the early 1990s, the violent crime rate today is up more than 300% since we started keeping comparable statistics in 1962. That's the crime rate, meaning population growth has been factored in. Yes, Toronto is "relatively" safe, but "safe" is a relative term.

Second, it's true schools are often safer than their surrounding communities.

But the TDSB is in denial about school violence and its own culture of fear and silence in addressing it, identified by its own task force following the fatal shooting of a Grade 9 student in a high school last year.

Third, while we agree with the mayor more must be done to halt the flow of illegal guns from the U.S., blaming straw men for street crime -- his latest target is gun collectors -- is irrelevant and tiresome.

Here's what will work.

In the short term, mandatory minimum sentences for anyone caught using a gun, or any weapon, in committing an offence, plus ending revolving-door justice, soft sentencing, easy bail and early parole.

In the long term, effective, public spending on community, education, training and employment programs to tackle the poverty that often breeds crime.

There are no easy answers. Even putting a cop in every Toronto high school, as opposed to the 27 where officers have been placed in a pilot project that started Monday, wouldn't stop crime.

But politically correct babbling about how safe we all are, and predictable calls for handgun bans, won't get the job done, either.