Random shooting death of Bailey Zaveda has left the city shaken

Random shooting death of Bailey Zaveda has left the city shaken and has inevitably raised the same questions that have haunted Toronto's streets for decades.Is there any way to make sense of random shootings and is there anything we can learn from these types of events to prevent them from happening in the future? "That is the $60,000 question, which is what I am trying to work on now," said Rosemary Gartner, a professor with the Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto. Gartner has been studying homicides since 1976 and has spent about 20 years compiling a database detailing homicides in the city of Toronto between 1900 and 2003. "I don't know that in Toronto - over the last 20 to 30 years - there has been a trend towards more homicides in public places rather than in private ones," like domestic murders in people's homes, she said. "It used to be the other way around," she said. "But at the same time, as it has been going down it has changed in its character."The type of guns being used in homicides has changed as well. Statistics Canada reports that in 2007 handguns were used in about two-thirds of all homicides, up from about 25 per cent in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The majority of those shootings took place in urban centres, according to the report. "The numbers of those kind of shootings are definitely higher than they were ten years ago, in Canada," said Robert M. Gordon, director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. However, the majority are rooted in disputes amongst individuals involved in the drug trade, he said. "In any normal business context if you had a dispute with a supplier or a retailer you wouldn't go around shooting them. You would use lawyers, which are of course slower and more expensive and less efficient." The actual chances of becoming a shooting victim as an innocent bystander have not been predicted with any kind of statistical reliability, but the chances are slight, he said. Unfortunately most handguns are extraordinarily inaccurate weapons, so once the bullets actually start flying there is a good chance someone innocent will get caught in the crossfire. There are clear messages being sent by the individuals who decide to open fire in public, said Gordon. The first being 'don't mess with us, or this is going to happen to you,' and second being 'we can do whatever we want to do with impunity,' he said. "The implication being if you get in our way we will pop you off as well." The shootings fill the public with fear and shake the public faith in the criminal justice system, resulting in "a slow, grinding process of demoralization," he said. Typically, after these types of shootings there is a call for stronger laws, "which politician's love because passing laws is very cheap," said Gordon.
"It feeds into that frenzy of law and order, which can lead to bad decisions on the part of politicians and policy makers. That is what concerns me more than addressing or being scared of being hit by a stray bullet."