AMID the sounds of panic and gunshots, just one man stood out. Because he was acting so normally.
Faisal Hussain was just strolling down a street in Toronto, Canada’s biggest city, when Jerry Pinksen caught sight of him out of the corner of his eye.
Mr Pinksen, an ER nurse, had rushed in to the street from a restaurant after hearing screams that somebody had been shot and needed help.
“I should have thought ‘why is this guy walking so calmly during such a traumatic event?’ he told Canada’s Global News TV . “But I was fixated. Then I heard a click, he raised his arms and then bullets started flying at us.”
Mr Pinksen had not realised but he had been followed in to the street by his girlfriend, Danielle Kane, a student nurse. She was hit in the stomach, a bullet breaking her spine. “I just became really emotional and I just started feeling grief and guilt rush over me. But then I thought to myself, ‘No. I have to be a nurse now’.” He dragged Ms Kane in to the restaurant. She is expected to live. But Mr Pinksen is not sure she will walk again.
His story - and those of scores of others who witnessed Hussein randomly slaughter pedestrians in the busy Danforth Avenue neighbourhood - have sparked a whole new debate on guns.
Two people are dead - a girl of ten and a young woman of eighteen - and another 13, including Ms Kane, injured. Hussein shot himself dead after a firefight with police.
Memorial
Toronto’s council formally called on government to allow a city-wide ban on handguns. Its mayor, John Tory, asked “Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?”,
Canada has long had a similar debate on guns as the United States, though the issues is not quite as fraught. But even before Danforth, Canadian policy-makers had been moving beyond a debate on ban or not to ban. They want to adopt a Scottish approach to tackling violence, to see gun crime as a public health issue and diverting police budgets to prevention. In short, they want to do for guns, what Scotland did for knives.
In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, which took place on July 22, Ontario’s head of public health, Peter Donnelly took to the airwaves.
Dr Donnelly, until 2008 Scotland’s deputy chief medical officer , had a message from his native land. He had lessons from the old world for the new.
He told CBS Radio: “If you go back ten years, Glasgow had the reputation as being the most violent city in western Europe and the stats bore that out. Now they have the lowest homicide rates they have ever had.”
Scotland, of course, has knives rather than guns. But the underlying problem, Dr Donnelly said, was the same: alienated young men.
He explained: “The police came to the conclusion that though enforcement was important, enforcement alone was not going to solve it. So what they worked with all the other agencies in the city and they tried to create an alternative pathway for the guys who were involved in gangs and crime. “If they did not take part in gang activities and they laid down their weapons, they could have access to good stuff.” The “good stuff”, he said, included help getting back in to education or work.
He added: “When they got a job and began to take part in regular economy, it was life changing. For young men who stuck with the programme - and they almost all did - after two years their chance of committing a violent crime was halved. Even more improtantly, their carriage of a weapon was reduced by 85 per cent. That was what really made a different to the homicide rates.”
Police after incident
The Danforth killings sparked a huge disinformation campaigns online. Terror group Islamic State falsely claimed the 29-year-old as one of its own. Far right groups said the same thing. Fake pictures were distributed on social media.
Others, more credibly, suggested Hussein had a history of poor mental health, including psychosis. But where did he get a gun? Hussein had no criminal history but his elder brother, Farad, did. The 31-year-old has previously been charged with possessing drugs and a weapon.
Canada’s gun debates still rumble on. But the country’s long and nearly open border with the United States means that, like Mexico, it may always face high levels of firearms availability compared with Europe.
- READ MORE: Scotland's homicides at record lows
Canada therefore, argue violence experts, may have to live with guns even if it follows the UK’s example of the ban imposed after 1996 Dunblane massacre.
Dr Donnelly, explaining how Scotland nearly halved its homicide rate in a decade, said: “It took a lot of patience, it took a lot of determination. “There is no quick fix. It was quite a remarkable programme. It took the combined effort of everybody in the city and it’s encouraging that Toronto looks like it’s planning the same thing.”
Toronto
Young men, he said, commit crimes and young men need a positive pathway out of trouble. Canada, Dr Donnelly added, has reached “a moment” with different levels of government understanding gun crime as a public health issue, just like other problems medics like Mr Pinksen deal with.
He summed up: “It feels like from this awful tragedy there could be something positive.”
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