I've said before that I'm not a fan of guns and I guess that puts me squarely in the demographic of the Toronto City resident who doesn't understand or doesn't care to understand what a long gun or a pistol or a collectable piece from the Second World War means to a hobbyist or a sports/target shooter.

 

Then again, I don't collect baseball cards, I don't tune my car and my only hobby seems to be going online to absorb others people's thoughts and issue in the faint hope that one day I can make sense of what they're saying and bring it to the radio.

 

Today, just days after his illogical, ill-tempered rant, Mayor Miller should have dropped what he was doing to go to Scarborough.  A young man died, shot to death, steps from a school, and police appear to know what happened.  Somebody woke up this morning and determined that somebody else had to die.  It could have been about drugs, money or a diss or a girlfriend who got the wrong look at a dance on the weekend.

 

It doesn't matter.  The Mayor, who is so determined to return Toronto to pre-amalgamation by ignoring everything that happens north of Bloor, west of Parkside, east of Victoria Park and south of....the lake, spewed nonsense this week all over target shooters thanks to a greaseball who belonged to a Durham Region gun club and illegally carried his pistol into a Toronto strip club like an NBA small forward during All-Star week in Las Vegas.

And an innocent guy died.

 

Today, the mayor could have done the right thing an appeared near Blessed Mother Theresa Catholic Secondary and issued a stern warning to the gang-bangers, the young black men in this city who've bought into the gang culture, and warned them that this will not stand.  He could have warned them that police resources are unlimited, Toronto Housing policy is unwavering....if you're a kid who thinks gangs are an option in this city, you're going to learn something different.

 

Nope.  We've got the Toronto Food Cart program to work on.  We've got another five million to hand to the aggressive panhandlers to convince them to live in our social housing.  We've got Nuit Blanche and Open Doors and we've got to bill private property owners to remove tagging painted onto their walls by at-risk youth who're just expressing themselves.  We have racially-segregated schools to ramp up.

 

We have a failure of leadership, a failure to address real issues and a failure to make this city safe for the millions of people who are fed up with gangs, ethnic violence and bleating from the poverty industry claiming all of this, acquired in the past 30 years, is because of some bitter imbalance in a great, equitable society like Canada's.

 

Toronto's message to gangs: "We've been expecting you".