Friday, January 23, 2009

Subway shooting

TTC chair Adam Giambrone said Friday that the recent mid-morning shooting at Osgoode station may have left subway riders shaken, but they have little reason to be concerned about their general safety while riding public transit.

After most of the gun-related incidents that have occurred in the Toronto area over the past couple years, we've heard that actually crime is down in the city and the streets are safer than ever. I don't know how those stats are gathered or tabulated, but it seems obvious to me that the number of incidents involving guns have been going up and up and up.

When I was growing up, violence on our transit system was very rare, unheard of really. It seems that guns were rare back then too, but today they seem to be everywhere, and I don't think policing has done much to help.

Are you seeing more gun violence in the place you live?

4 comments:

Barbara Bruederlin said...

Sadly, I absolutely am. We had several gun murders in the first week of January alone, all gang related. One victim was an innocent bystander, eating lunch. A 10 minute drive from my house. Horribly sad.

A said...

I live in a very rural area where guns are everywhere but serious crime is rare, so far. (We grew up shooting at speed signs. It's what you do in the country, I guess.)

We did have a crazy incident recently involving four extremely drunk teenagers who decided they needed battle scars, so they went behind the only movie theater in town and faked a gang shootout. Three of them wound up in the hospital. At least they only shot each other. One at a time, with a .22 pistol. The police (and highway patrol, and sheriff) figured out what actually happened pretty quickly. Amazing.

But I live in the real wild west, and what with the new liberal regime (yay Obama!) there is no ammunition to be had at any price around here and the pawn shop and sporting goods stores from Omaha to Reno are clean out of every kind of gun. I even considered getting a little 9mm Glock or another small pistol -- I do live alone and this is gun country -- but I've decided I'd rather save up for a Nintendo Wii. My boyfriend, who had a horrible gun experience in Kansas City years ago, will be happier.

sp said...

The increased presence of guns and violence was one of the worries I had with the neighbourhood we lived in when we lived in Toronto (Giambrone's riding actually). I never thought we lived in a bad neighbourhood either being in Little Portugal, but we were just a block from Bloor and Lansdowne and all that

In the last two or three years that we lived there I heard gunshots more than once in the alley across the street. We had police come and search our backyard garden in case someone had tossed the weapon in there. We were questioned about having seen or heard anything. Two people were killed a block in different directions from our house, both from gunshot wounds. On top of that the nearby high school was often locked down because of violence or concern about weapons.

Where we are now I never thought there would be such problems, but then not long after we moved here I heard about a drive by shooting in our little city. However, it's not a big problem here. People are more concerned about bears than anything else here.

tshsmom said...

I think the craziness comes from the overpopulation in cities rather than guns.
In my area, over 90% of the homes have guns. We have NO gun crimes.