So there was a “town hall” on gun control in Toronto yesterday, I would have liked to attend but was busy spending time with the family.  In any case I put quotations around town hall because from the people I know who went, the questions in the Q&A portion were screened before hand and the more poignant questions about the numbers were not addressed.

Mr. Blair, a former Toronto Police chief who spoke at Sunday’s event, has been tasked with stick-handling the handgun issue. He said that moving forward, “evidence” will help guide him. But at the town hall, even the evidence proved contentious.

As he sat onstage speaking, Mr. Blair cited Toronto Police figures indicating that an increasing proportion of guns used in crime are coming from domestic sources (as opposed to illegally through the border) – at least of those guns that police are able to track. That comment drew loud booing, with some shouting that the minister was misrepresenting the data.

Source: The Globe & Mail

Emphasis are mine & gun owners are upset because that’s a blatant lie and I illustrated that fact previously with actual Toronto police data which does not say that at all.

The video player embedding from CP24 doesn’t seem to work but how about listen to Louis March, founder of the Zero Gun violence group.

He gets it, banning guns is the easy (wrong) answer to the problem of gun violence, let’s tackle the root causes of gun crime.  Poverty and lack of opportunity often leads gangs and hence gang violence and how we solve this is difficult to answer.  How about a reinvestment in poorer areas which bring opportunity to the local populace so people are not struggling to feed their families?  Raise the minimum wage to a living wage, end the war drugs, let’s remove the money and power from these criminal elements.

Of course these are difficult issues to tackle, it’s easier to blame an inanimate object and call it evil.  As I mentioned to one commenter, homicides are committed at the same rate with knives as guns over a 5 year period (actually there are more stabbings, 939 vs 862 shooting homicides) but we don’t talk about banning knives right.  Let’s really do something rather than token gestures but that’s not sexy and will take more than 4 years so politicians are not interested.