The litigation you mentioned how would this work with the recent decision from congress to give the gun manufacturers immunity?
It doesn’t apply to Canada—we’re our own country. There’s some pretty reprehensible things here. My understanding is that it’s entirely within the gun manufacturers ability in the US of building guns so that only the owner can shoot it through fingerprint technology, but they don’t. They’re making a choice too. They’re making a choice to make things available that kill people on the streets of Toronto. We’ll see if the federal government follows up on that litigation.

Well, if half of guns are coming from the US, then the rest are obviously coming from within Canada. How are they getting from their places of origins into the community?
There seems to be a couple of ways, they’re being sold obviously. The police just found out that they were being sold on the internet. You know we hear stories of people pulling up in cars and selling guns, I don’t know if that’s true. That’s part of it. Part of it is that they’re being stolen from gun shops or from legitimate collectors, or I should “legal,” in quotes, from around Toronto. The question for me is: does anyone need any gun in this city legal or not? And outside of the police the answer is no? So I think there’s a role for us to act in Canada and say, “we don’t need handguns. Period” It doesn’t matter if you’re a collector or not.

In your opinion is there a place for gun ownership?
No.

Are you specifically speaking of handguns?
I understand that in certain Northern communities, especially Native communities that certain people hunt for a living. I understand that. That is tradition and that rifles are part of the life there. But there’s certainly no need for guns in urban areas of any kind.

Are you familiar with a company we have in Scarborough called Para-Ordanance?
Yes.

What do you think of them making a product, which endangers the surrounding community, for which there is such little demand for domestically?
Well, I have to be consistent. I don’t think there is a place for guns… I’ve lived in the States, I went to university in the States and I don’t think there’s a place for guns there either and I think it’s true for that company also.

Have you had any contact with them?
No.

One idea that you proposed was for a central gun storage facility, what’s the status on that?
Yeah, it wasn’t actually me, it was an idea from one of the members of council, Deputy Mayor Michael Feldman. If are laws are going to remain that people don’t have to have guns then they’re being used for things like target practice and those sorts of things, well, then they should be stored there. Because it’s true in this city that kids have died in this city recently because of break-ins at people’s homes. And [the guns] were stored in accordance with the law and that wasn’t good enough to stop people. One of the reasons there was so many shootings in Malvern a couple of years ago was because one so called collector’s guns were stolen. And according to the police there were a number of shootings, I think 12, I can’t remember the exact statistic [but] if those had been stored centrally it would have made a difference—they wouldn’t have been on the street.

Had do you combat people saying that they won’t be protected if there guns are in a storage facility?
Guns don’t protect people. They make it worse, and we don’t want to get to that type of violent society like they have in the Unites States where the murder rate is ten times ours because people have that philosophy. There’s one thing about a gun, it’s not like a knife, it’s not like anything else, you can be the world’s biggest coward and it still makes you a killer. The thing about our city is that every kind of crime is down virtually. Robbery is down, break and enter is down, everything is down—except guns. So the existence of the guns makes what could be an altercation, or a fight, or a stabbing a lot worse. It makes it much easier to take a punk and make him a killer. I say to people who want to defend themselves, it makes the problem worse, you’re making the problem worse. You’re making my city less safe and I don’t except that.

So why do think it is that gun violence has gone up this year in particular?
Well, it’s not just this year, it’s been happening for a few years. The one question that I haven’t had answered is where is this surge of guns coming from? It’s not just happening in Toronto, it’s happening in Boston for example. Where is this surge coming from? We know in general terms, half are from the States, half are local. Why has there been such an upsurge. Now the second thing is, I turn this question on its head, and I say “what is this question telling us?” What it’s telling me is that it’s a warning sign. We have more and more neighborhoods where people are becoming have-nots and this is a sign of other serious social problems and we need to be addressing those.

How is the $50 million that Paul Martin has pledged going to be used?
My philosophy is this: safety isn’t about the absence of crime only, it’s about everybody knowing that they have a real role in society and they have a place and they’re going to have the opportunity to be able to express themselves and have their needs fulfilled. Gun crime is a symptom that that is not happening in some neighbourhoods of this city—that we’re becoming a city of haves and have-nots. So the Prime Minister announcement is part of an overall strategy. On the policing side, we’re trying to get police in communities, on the street, in uniform, so that the people know them and they know the people and you build a partnership between people and the police. You can see that in neighbourhoods that that’s working there are a lot fewer problems than in neighbourhoods were it’s not working. The second thing, and this is where the Prime Minister’s announcement is relevant is that we’re trying to invest in young people in those communities. So the Prime Minister’s announcement had three components, one is about diversion programs, so that when kids first get engaged with the law, they’ll try to divert them and get them in programs that will get them on a different route, that’s important because we don’t have those in Toronto, we’re the only place in this country that doesn’t have them. The second part is some money for apprenticeship job training to show kids that there’s an opportunity and they’re actually going to have a chance. And the third part is for what are called crime prevention programs but are really about things like where we were [today, like] San Romano way (?) . There’s a community center built there by ten local kids under the supervision of the carpenter’s union as a result of the Mayor’s Community Safety Plan. That was training so that they become carpenter’s apprentices and have a career and a job and a decent chance at a decent living. And ten of the eleven are still carpenters. But also when we built that local community center, there’s not a lot of money in that neighbourhood, it became a place where local kids could come and learn how to use computers. That’s the kind of thing this money is going to be used for.

There was a quote in The National Post in an article by Adam Radwanski that says, “Torontonians has a long and slightly hysterical inclination to view themselves as under siege.” What do you think about that quote?
Well, we’re a safe city. But we have to take the gun violence of this summer and three summers ago seriously. We’re not under siege. But we have neighbourhoods in this city where people feel under siege. We need to monitor everything, not just the government I have, not just the provincial and the federal government, not just the police, not just the community, not just the non-profit agencies but the business community too. Everybody has a stake in making this city safe and we should be all on the same path and the way to do that is to make people who live in these neighbourhoods who feel, justly, that they don’t have a real chance in life, we got a show them that they do.

Do you feel that the media’s coverage of the past year has been fair?
I think what the media did was to react to the feelings of Torontonians. These events are not expected in our city and we don’t want to treat them as routine—we never want to treat a shooting as routine—so I think the media was reflecting our collective values as Torontonians—our shock and outrage. I think it’s appropriate for people to be shocked and outraged.

When Fantino was the Police Chief he singled out 50 Cent and hip-hop in general for inciting aggression and more generally feeding into violent attitudes. What’s your opinion of that?
Music is an expression of people’s experience. It’s not the other way around. If a rock musician in my generation wrote a song about LSD it didn’t make kid in my generation want to take LSD. Music is an expression of what’s happening and urban music is an expression of what’s happening in urban areas. I don’t buy that.

You don’t think that music has any effect?
I think music has lots of effects, but that’s like saying that if you listen to Bruce Springsteen you’re going to close down steel mills in Pennsylvania because he sings about communities that have no hope because jobs are going. It’s the other way around, people listen to music, because it speaks to their personal experience.

What have you from the people in the community regarding this?
I tell you what people tell me in the community. People don’t talk about music. They talk about their kids. And their kids talk about having a chance. Parents my age, they say unanimously, “our children don’t have programs after school, are older get into trouble at school and get treated worse because of their race and they don’t have a chance to get an education—to get a job. We want our younger children to have a place to be supervised because we’re working hard to keep a roof over our heads and we want our older kids to have a real chance.” That’s what people tell me. Kids say much the same thing. No, I’ve never heard anybody—anybody—say to me, music is causing this. I think the idea is backwards.