It’s a bit of a mug’s game to try to find meaning in the kind of shooting crime that occurred June 2 in a food court at Toronto’s Eaton Centre, in which one man was killed and two other people – including a 13-year-old boy eating dinner with his family who was hit in the head by a stray bullet – were seriously injured.
The details will only come out at trial, so it’s hard to speculate on what exactly happened or why it happened. But reports suggest the shooter and the victim were part of the same gang, and the shooting may have been in retaliation for the victim (and the injured man) having robbed and stabbed the shooter this past winter.
The reports also suggest the two men ran into each other randomly in the mall, so this appears to be partly a crime of opportunity. Nevertheless, their alleged gang affiliations belie police claims that the shooting wasn’t gang-related, presumably because it wasn’t a case of gang-on-gang violence.
The shooting has generated a huge amount of news coverage and a deluge of commentary and analysis.
Torontonians need to take a deep breath and avoid hyperventilating about the incident, but we also need to figure out if anything can be done to avoid similar events in the future. Continue reading