FOUR days before the massacre in a Colorado cinema attracted
world attention, a gunfight erupted at a street party in the
Toronto suburb of Scarborough. A 14 year-old girl and a 23 year-
old man were killed and 23 others were injured, making it the
bloodiest mass shooting in the city’s history. Only one person
has been arrested, and was charged with reckless discharge of a
firearm.  The deaths were the third public murder in Canada’s
biggest city in two months. On June 2nd a supper-time score-
settling gunfight in a food court at the Eaton centre, a popular
downtown shopping mall, killed two combatants and wounded five
shoppers. Later that month a man was shot in what appeared to be
a targeted killing, amidst a crowd watching the European
football tournament in a downtown cafe.  These outbreaks of
violence are all the more surprising given the generally
encouraging trend in Canadian public safety. On July 24th the
official statistics agency reported that total crime fell by 6%
from 2010 to 2011, bringing the ra